


Dragon, Dragon

by SelfDestructian



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Altered Mental States, Angst and Tragedy, Animal Abuse, Animal Instincts, Auror Harry Potter, Auror Ron Weasley, Azkaban, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Bonding, Caretaking, Caring Harry, Child Death, Conspiracy, Coping, Crimes & Criminals, Daily Prophet, Dark Magic, Depression, Domestic, Drug Abuse, Emotional Baggage, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, F/M, Falling In Love, Friendship, Gore, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hiding, Human Trafficking, Hurt/Comfort, Isolation, Kidnapping, Knockturn Alley, Loss of Identity, Loss of Trust, M/M, Magical Accidents, Medical Examination, Medical Procedures, Memory Loss, Mental Breakdown, Mental Disintegration, Mental Instability, Missing Persons, Mutilation, Newspapers, Non-Sexual Age Play, Non-Sexual Submission, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Harry Potter, Physical Abuse, Polyjuice Potion, Post-Hogwarts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Drama, Psychological Trauma, Rescue Missions, SLOWBURN-SLOWBURN-SLOWBURN, Sexual Violence, Slavery, Slow Burn, Survivor Guilt, Trust Issues, Undercover Missions, this is not a happy story, vengeance, yet - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2019-08-03 03:04:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16317908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SelfDestructian/pseuds/SelfDestructian
Summary: Harry leads a timid life, his bravery of once shattered by a fatal accident he caused someone else.Not trusting himself anymore, he only ever brings out his passion for helping when it's against magical creature abuse; herein he pours all of his remorseful heart. Then an unexpected case confronts him with the past which forbade him to find happiness in life for years straight.A dragon needs rescue - and a lot more of what Harry thought he'd never be able to provide again.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> **HC SVNT DRACONES:** This is not your DRARRY TO GO fic. It's a somewhat disturbing slowburn that puts romance, fluff and smut in the far background of a plotline heavy with psychological wounds and their healing. Take note that this story might be triggering now and then, and that at one point there will be visual gore. 
> 
> Tread with caution if you are of fragile nature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

It's late again. Striplights sizzle from the ceiling, almost muggle-worthy their unadorned look and cool light. But they have a wayward tone to their droning sound, impreaching almost, making a bee swarm's rumpus to remind the office's owner of their need to be fed their monthly Patronus please or otherwise they wouldn't be able to shine for much longer than maybe two more days.

Harry knows, Harry _knows_ it, he's just really very busy again.

He's wearing a concentrated frown on his face, and he's wearing no glasses for quite a while already which is proved by the fact that the two red spots his nose-pads usually cause him have completely vanished by now. Up close Harry's eye-sight has always been better without glasses, and he's getting up really close to the curious object on his desk wich refuses every Engorgio and every magical magnifyer whatsoever.

It is a piece of parchment, looking innocent enough, a letter telling its addressee that their order of an unnamed, mysterious nature is awaiting their retrieving it. But the signature ... well, Harry is gut-driven sure there's something up with it. Gladly he managed to secure the letter before it got properly delievered. It was lucky really because the signature is looking much like something with a little foot stepped into the ink before it could dry, leaving an interesting pattern and – most importantly – the subtle hint of what is sold here in the first place. This pattern was not set by accident. It is deliberately there to evince the validity of the ware, Harry is sure. Someone took a little foot like a song bird's and pressed it into a name in ink like a seal into wax ...

You see, the tiny toes of Faenels have one-hundred and twenty-five wrinkles each, always, with no exception. The tiny toes of Faenels are also slimmer that a quarter inch, which makes it a downright pain to count and reconstruct the actual number of wrinkles in the blotch of ink across the suspicious signature. Harry needs to be absolutely sure this is what he thinks it is before passing it on - he doesn't want half the Auror department gate-crashing, say, an ancient, clueless apothecary again (just because he thought they might be brewing anti-aging tonics with illegal lively ingredients) - but …

_One-hundred and twenty-five. And I didn't lose count this time._

Sure it's always better to have bottled witness evidence for the authorities to pensieve, but this will do. This will do lots.

Harry grins triumphantly, albeit his joy is of angry nature with a distinct edge of loathing to it.

Selling the tiny feet of Faenels is buying you a direct ticket to Azkaban: Their original owners are most endangered magical creatures. Harry just found a dealer out and very likely a whole breeding farm if said dealer would sing, which he _should_ in light of what he's selling here. This is a jackpot of wizarding animal cruelty - and the hope of ending at least a portion of it.

Harry's done a good day's work today.

 

 

 


	2. Of how Harry Potter fares after the war

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

It's not uncommon for him to pay occasional late visits at his friends's. He's allowed at all times of the day, and as Rosie keeps Ron and Hermione up in steady periods anyway Harry doesn't even have all too much of a guilty concience about it tonight. He just needs to be around someone now. Grimmauld is really just so – whatever would even describe it. Dusty maybe. Harry is too chipper to roll in homely dust just yet.

He flooes and the cold vastness of the nightly Ministry's entrance hall contracts behind his back, howling angrily as if he was the last to disturb its freezing slumber. Once through the bright green flames he adjusts to the darkness of the living room, creeping on tiptoes to where he well knows the kitchen will be. Having arrived without fail, he lights the littlest of the cozy muggle lamps Arthur insists on being much brighter than candles and much more efficient than recasting Lumos all the time – all which Ron gladly adopted from his dad and which Hermione couldn't be more happy about, giving her the familiarity of her childhood muggle home even in her wizarding adult life.

Harry makes himself camomile tea, stealthy and big-gestured as a silent movie actor, but he doesn't have to wait long for the inevitable wailing sound. Smiling at Ron's big yawns and heavy steps to the nursery, Harry announces himself.

Ron looks just as blissfully battered as new parents do. Tonight must be a _Hermione sleeps through_ night. Harry just can't help but grin like a fool as his friend of old with his firstborn in his arms steps into the gentle light of the kitchen and squints as would a mouldwarp into floodlights.

“Oi there, mate”, sighs Ron without wind as he climbs into a chair round the breakfast table, his ginger hair a mess that would pass as modern art. Grumpy Rosie, wide-awake, is babbling and throwing her baby fists in the air. Her pastel pink romper with its magically hopping bunnies on it does nothing to mar her imposing sign language which surely talks of all the splendour and glory only she would understand.

“'s never even hungry, wakes me just for fun, the little minx.” Ron makes his voice an accusing whine towards his daughter who seems just an innocent bit smug.

“I bet she does”, chuckles Harry and talks silly high pitched nothings with the girl as he helps Ron to a cup of tea as well.

Rose Granger-Weasley is so young and already so fierce: Obviously not very pleased with the general situation, she leaves no doubt at how little she approves of being stuck on her Dada's boring lap. Probably hoped to get to her play rug and toys when she woke ol' pops up the gazillionth time tonight. Ron rocks the mistress on his knee and she fights against dozing off again - in vain - until a shiny spittle bubble sits in the corner of her rosy Rosie mouth. Harry wants to prick it with his pinkie and smooch that baby pout, but he better not. She'll wake again, always hopeful that uncle Harry might be more compliant to her important demands.

She's snoring as much as babies snore when Ron has his first pleasant gulp of tea and a heartfelt sigh deflating from his chest.

“Thanks mate, that's a _brilliant_ cup of tea.”

“Just camomile.”

“And made _itself_ , like, practically. You'd think I'd have just one of my two hands free to spell some water boiling, would you, with that power-package here? No _way_. You should come over more often and make me tea. I _love_ tea.”

Harry shrugs with a smirk. “You love everything around this time of night.”

“If it makes _itself_? Yes, please.”

They share a muffled laugh, quiet to not disturb little Rosie's sleep. Then with a bounce of his brows Ron nods at Harry's office attire, meaning it noticed that this surely is not the usual kind of post-nightmare visit which has Harry normally floo over in his washed out tee and sweat pants, curling up on the couch in the living room, sometimes trembling, always scared, only to be patted on the head by Ron once he's found or hugged and lectured by Hermione about finally getting himself a less creepy place lo live in than Grimmauld Place.

No, tonight Harry is not the vulnerable loner needy for comfort. For a change, tonight he's not the only one left shaken by a war of years ago, the only one who couldn't ever really move on. He's got a thing going and he's gonna rescue much likely thousands of innocent Faenels from the violent fate of having their precious tiny talon-feet chopped off their fairy-fragile bodies. Harry Potter is on a roll again and he doesn't feel vulnerable at all!

Ron asks him. “Much work today?”

And Harry grins, giddy like a boy. “I have a big one for you Aurors.”

Alas, his flutter of pride is short-lived, but he actually did expect his news would convey some mixed feelings to his friend; at the mention of _you Aurors_ casually excluding Harry himself, Ron tenses ever so awkwardly. He always does.

 _For shame_ , Harry thinks and huffs a bit, but he won't have this talk again.

It's been five years since he resigned from the Auror Forces, five years since that accident. Harry is just in his right place to be, working for the MCAC department: _Magical Creature Abuse Control._ This is where he belongs now. It's not like Ron stole his dream job, staying an Auror while Harry couldn't. After all, Harry didn't last long and that was solely his own fault. He never regretted his decision to change subject after all, given that he could have easily retired for good, maybe even _should_ have (if you'd ask Rita Skeeter). No, Hary didn't give up. He adjusted. That does give him pride.

Determined to act confident, he clears his throat. “It's a case of Faenel farming. Going out tomorrow.”

Ron eases his stance, scratching his neck and schooling his attention to the matter at hand, away from the lingering things unsaid between them.

“Wow”, he grants at length, earnestly impressed. “That's bad. I mean, good that you found it. Bad they're still doing it, though.”

“Yeah.” It's really no good. To think of all those delicate, almost human looking things being bred only to ...

_Ah yes._

All of a sudden Harry swallows thickly. His heart-rate does a run.

_Human looking._

Maybe this is why he was so keen on getting this through in the first place. He didn't even realize … but this is as close as he'll ever get to help humans once more. His weakness forbids him to tread further in that direction ever again – the wretched cries for help, help them, _help me,_ and blood like sweat of the beast that is war, the beast that is hungry, and exploding curses flying, flinging limbs from children who have never learned how and why to defend themselves – shuddering, Harry feels the old sickness demanding more of him than he can spare. His vision grows cloudy and black at the corners, warning him.

It's Faenels now. Faenels, no human girl torn in two by his failed attempt to apparate her out of danger, failed because he couldn't, didn't _focus_ , just one moment, because that curse really caught him off guard and passed just so by his ear, grazing his scar like fire, and that laughter, that _did_ sound like – _no. Stop._ _It's Faenels. Not Peggy Fawn. Not her parents weeping at my feet._

Spitting in his face.

Harry shakes his head to fight the threatening palsy down, the shivers hot and cold and unforgiving ... and he does comes out of it. He even chuckles, even if only sadly so. Escapes into his good work done today. The Faenels. Better think of all those creatures they'd be able to save.

“My brain is spinning a bit, you know, because I had to identify a footprint, and they're little. I was like counting life lines all day. Got it messed up a thousand times. Now I'm a bit high on _Miscount Me Not_ charms.”

Ron did notice Harry's breathless voice, and he did see that detached look in his eyes. Harry gives his silence a weighty glance, telling Ron to let it slip; sighing, he does.

“That reminds me, though”, Ron clears his throat and rearranges the little sleepy pouch that is Rosie, “we're gonna hand _you_ something, too. Something to look into. I don't get permission to raid the place until we have further evidence. That's what my boss wants you for, had all the papers filled to summon you over first thing tomorrow. Just, the whole job _stinks_ and – you don't have to, mate. Cries trap to the heavens if you'd ask me.”

Taken aback, Harry frowns. MCAC does not normally get cases in from the larger departments, they function like a little independent bunch of sleuths pushing their noses into matters the authorities would never notice on their own. Subtle investigation to support the greater work is what they do. And restricted investigation at that 'cause it would have to be a case involving magical creatures to begin with. Not to mention Ron's boss wants specifically Harry for this job, not one of his co-workers who have been with the Ministry way longer than him, and why exactly is that again?

Ron's unwillingness to trust Harry with this only carves his interest sharper.

“What's it about?”

Clicking his tongue, Ron shrugs and looks a bit lost: “That's the point. We've actually got nothing really – except that it's about a dragon and … ”, suddenly his eyes grow wide, “mate, you didn't even hear it yet, did you?”

“What?”

“Aebischer!”

Harry scans his memory for the name: That's a high rank secretary in the Ministry, part in dozens of charity organizations and founder of the project _Wiggle_ which has the plan to prove that blood purity does not affect magical ability. Harry heard they want to undertake a muggle-blood transfusion with a volunteering pureblood wizard once their studies excluded every possible risks of health. However, he cannot possibly recall a face to the name. Harry was never good at keeping up with politician rats. As it is, the man remains an abstractum.

“What about him?”

To Harry's growing alarm, Ron is beside himself, clutching Rosie tighter to his chest. He looks rather pale out of a sudden, that means paler than usual, and the muggle lamp suddenly seems to throws it's artificial, yellow light all too harschly against the darkness pushing at the windows, peering in through the thin, white draperies.

“Bloody – it's fresh, completely fresh. The Prophet will be on _fire_ with this – we took Aebischer into custody for decades of – ! - uh.”

Ron stops himself as if he ran into a wall, and Harry's guts sink. Seeing his friend's all of a sudden so reluctant face sends a painful thorn through his chest; Ron wants to spare him the details.

Everybody's always _sparing_ Harry nowadays, be it Teddy's grandmother who limited his visiting hours to relieve him off the responsibilty – as if he wouldn't know she just doesn't trust him around the boy anymore. As if he'd take his little hand and rip him into shreds. Like he did Peggy. Poor, little, frightened Peggy ...

Everybody always spares themselves to deal with Harry nowadays. Stubborn and bitter with self-hate he demands at least Ron to be better that this.

“Years of _what_?”

“Uhm. _Fuck_.”

“Ron.”

“Nothing really -”

“Cut it out! _What_ now?”

Ron fidgets, shaking his head _no_. This is seeing red for Harry and he snaps.

“You really think you can keep stuff from me that Skeeter will be yelling from the rooftops?! I can damn well READ, Ron, and I fucking WILL, like everybody else!”

Starting, Rosie wakes with a wailing gasp that bursts into a full blown sobbing attack. As Ron shushes her and stands to rock and walk her in soothing circles, Harry can't believe himself and buries his face in his palms with a great flush of shivers icing down his back. His cheeks are burning with shame, making the room feel like it's getting colder by the moment.

 _Great_. He is a goddamned fucking _mess_. To punish himself he decides he won't go and see Teddy next week, not even once. He'll only make him cry as well.

“Awww ... now there, Rosie … you're alright, darling, Dada's here … “

“See, I'm … sorry. I didn't mean to shout.”

“ … it's alright … it's alright, shushy-shush … “

_No, it's not._

For the moment being, and very understandably so, Ron decides to ignore Harry's remorse in favor for his daughter. That only keeps the moment as ugly as Harry made it be and doesn't help a bit, even though little Rose does settle in the end.

With a capitulating sigh, Ron sits back at the table and has another gulp of tea. Rosie sleeps tight again, but she looks tired out now. Harry could hit himself in the face.

The silence grows uncomfortable, so Harry fills it up with self-defense, whispered and regretful but unwilling self-defense.

“What do you think, I'm gonna spontaneously die or something if I hear _violence_? I'm not struck stupid, Ron. I _know_ there's people getting hurt out there, all the time, and I can _talk_ about it. Christ. What do you think I'm working with? I've seen cruelties done to animals, things you couldn't imagine - I can still handle a _lot_.”

When he meets his friend's eyes again it's that both of them give in. Harry knows Ron only wants his best, and Ron knows Harry feels pushed aside enough as it is.

They owe each other more than that.

“Aebischer's in human trafficking”, admits Ron at last. “Everyone's been struck by the catch. This man is a monster, mate, to make it short. I've been knee deep in files of missing children of the last thirty years all evening. Fourty percent of those already prove to have been his doing. _Fourty_. Abducted for _one_ man. Muggle born wizards mostly, half blood's, too, never purebloods. He sold them all around the world for - “, glancing Harry in the eye, Ron stops himself again, but sternly this time.

 _That's as far as you go_ , say his eyes.

It's just because Harry can see how Ron's grip is tightening around his baby daughter once again that Harry respects the line this time. Maybe he doesn't even want to know what that Aebischer person could have very likely taken Rosie for as well. No, maybe Harry really doesn't need to know. Growing bleary eyed, he swallows. Imagination is a wicked thing if it comes to not knowing the worst and filling the blank with distortions of ifs and buts. Harry's heart is beating sickly as he watches magical bunnies jumping on a pastel pink romper, so sickly he thinks he would feel the bare organ slick with blood if he touched his chest. It's like a disgusting, jerking glob rather than anything healthy and reliable. Rosie snores like a kitten and her tiny feet kick about in her untouched dreams ...

Harry can still handle a lot. He _can_ face topics like that, squares his shoulders and tries not to hate how his fingers are trembling around the cup he's holding much too tightly now.

“Alright. What's all that to do with a dragon, though?”

“See, Aebischer's from Switzerland. We're to give him over to the swiss authorities, meaning he will very likely be sentenced to death because they haven't abandoned the Dementors there. He's given us a tip because he wants a deal: Live out his days here in our Azkaban rather than die. And that's how the dragon came up for discussion.”

Harry nods.

“It's apparently the best kept secrets and hottest attractions of years in Knockturn Alley. The Arena he calls the place where it's kept. We have this much and the actual address, some shabby shop selling near the knuckle artifacts. It's run by some dude called Laurent. _Special_ customers are to call him the Beast Keeper. That's the guys who are led into the cellar.”

“Illegal animal fights?”

“Likely. We had Aebischer under Veritaserum to see if he's being true, just, there's a barrier which he claims is from a security spell, and that shuts us out of his head and forces himself silent as a tombstone regarding what happens underground. We don't get more. I bet the man pulls a trick on us though. You should decline that job, mate, and we'll have him rocketing home in a day. That'd be for the best of all.”

It's true. The whole plot seems fishy, but … something about this has Harry already by the neck. He sits a moment, contemplating. The dragon could be a lie. What would Aebischer gain from that, however?

“And why's it again that your boss wants me?” Because even though surely the whole auror department is busy enough cleaning up all the cases at hand, they could get like anyone to help them out.

Ron frowns, relucting again. “Because you _are_ a good auror. You were and are, even after you left. If boss is to throw someone into a trap, he wants it to be someone able to get out again.”

This is not a compliment. It's thoughtless and inconsiderate of Harry's trauma in the past. Ron's worry is so thick in the nightly kitchen now, Harry could grab it; uncomfortable, he exhales and slumps in on himself. More to convince his own uneasiness than anyone he says: “I'd be proof pensieving so you can raid. I do this all the time.”

Slowly, Ron nods, oozing just how unhappy he is with the thought.

“Ron, I'd be fine.”

“ … I guess.”

_Yes, I'd be. I'd fucking be, I've done this all before!_

It's just frustrating Harry all over again, the little trust his friend is granting him and his competence. The little trust Harry has left for himself, Merlin. His hands are _shaking_ now. But even if it WAS a trap, whatever sort, Harry would indeed be the one to get out of it. That's damn right. Harry would be fine. Alright, so he made one mistake, one tragic, unforgivable mistake, but that does not mean that he's become a whole failure from it. He is Harry Potter, survivor of things most people will never live to know. He is all that, even today. And he's goddamn sick of feeling less.

He will pull this off and then they'll be either one rescued victim richer or sacking the bastard's cronies who set up his pretty trap along with him. It's a win/win situation. Harry can do this. He needs to know he can still do this.

Just, suddenly, he needs to know something entirely else, and it's squeezing off his air as it crosses his mind. The Knight Bus coming out of nowheren couldn't have hit him harder.

Thirty years of organized child abductions. It's merely five since Harry's accident.

His breath is hitching as he gathers up the courage to just ask.

“That Aebischer, though, did he … was he ... Peggy Fawn … ?”

“No!” exclaims Ron. Too loud. Too fast.

_That was a lie._

Harry fixes him with a knowing stare until he can't bear the look which is returned. Dizzy, he glances down, nodding and weakly adding: “Okay.”

Harry can still feel a little hand in his own hand. Fighting the emotion with all he's got, he decides to be strong and not cry now. He imagines the little hand to be scaly and green. Imagine, this man-monster who made him fail a helpless child has come back and taken a noble dragon this time. A beautiful, innocent being. _Again_. As if he's mocking Harry now that he resigned himself to protect animals and gave up helping humans, now that the best part of him _gave up_. As if that devil wants him to fail his new purpose in life as well and give up all over again.

“I'm doing it, Ron.”

“Wh-”

“The job.”

“No, you fucking _don't_ ”, Ron decidedly shakes his head, impressing Harry little with it.

“I'm doing it.”

If only Harry could save that dragon. Just get one soul out of that monster's grasp. He could hope to at least try and forgive himself, someday.

“ … you're not _over_ it, Harry. _Fuck_.”

And neither should he be. That what he's done, that's nothing to ever be over.

 

 

 


	3. Aebischer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

They have the plain interrogation room locked with a cocoon of thirty and three layers of secrurity charms. It's inescapable. Ron and a dozen aurors are positioned in a circle around the center of the room where a plain table stands and two occupied chairs face each other. Their hands are at their holsters so they could draw in time should the neck downwards body-bind that is cast on their convict release its grip by some unforeseeable chance. But it doesn't seem to.

Aebischer smiles. He's merely sitting, unnaturally bolt upright, which adds just another degree of hateful properness to him.

“The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” Once of three times incantated, the wand at Aebischer's throat is radiating yellow light, giving his larynx the foreign look of being translucent for a moment.

Was this Harry's wand, God knows it would rather cut the pig open for good. Hermione on the other hand has always had a self-control like steel.

“The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog”, repeats the swiss man, his accented words as soft as razors.

The spell starts to connect and Harry feels his own throat humming now – an unwelcome, intruding warmth keeps spreading there like a parasite would in its host. He swallows and balls both his fists on his knees. As a wave of nausea washes through his system he is glad that he's already sitting down, otherwise he would have faltered now. And Aebischer smiles at him.

“The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.”

Definite magic stings Harry's tongue and blows up an urge to gag, the warmth a clamping heat just one moment too long – until, suddenly, nothing but a foul aftertaste remains of the sensation. The glowing under Aebischer's chin grows weak until it's out, and as Harry convulsively clears his throat his voice is not his own.

Hermione invented this spell. It transfers the sound of one person's speech over to another using a pangram and a complex addition of charmwork. This spell did revolutionize undercover missions with Polyjuice as finally the missing link with the unchanging vocal cords was fixed. Being the inventor and to this day the best to master it yet, Hermione insisted on performing the procedure herself tonight.

It's eleven o'clock in the evening. After the initial filling in with Ron's superior earlier, namely Robards, Harry was left to spend the rest of the day waiting. He handed in the case of the Faenels, which took him just a few minutes. After that he read too much about dragon physics, refreshing his studies from his first months with the MCAC. He hated that he couldn't possibly guess what species he might be confronting later. He just didn't have any details to work with because the whole damn mission's so ridiculously shrouded in mystery. And as looming mystery casts its shadows without revealing itself, still there would no picture of Aebischer return to Harry's mind, which was blank and overwhelmed. He couldn't even grasp it all, who that person was, what he'd done. How he'd ruined the part of Harry's life that should have been wonderful - the part after Voldemort. Harry was to meet this man in a few hours. So little hours, so many unlived lifetimes fitting into them. He couldn't grasp it, and yet his fingers trembled like his body _knew_. Agitated and without much hope to calm down, he tried to sleep a little in his office, but that did not go well. He'd not closed one eye the whole night before already, all out of grim excitement.

By now his nerves are in shreds. But shreds are better coordinated than a knot.

Like the professional Hermione is, but with a cruel coldness to her usual manners, she lifts her wand to the captive's hair.

“May I?”

As if amused and only to mock this muggle-born witch, this mother to another not pureblooded witch – Aebischer's favorite prey – he nods in polite agreement: Of course he cannot speak until his voice will be returned to him. Of course he doesn't seem to mind that, though. This whole endeavour including his cooperation is his own design after all, and a character of his sort will not be frightened by what he himself suggested.

Harry can see Hermione struggling with her anger just a heartbeat long and he understands all too wrenchingly how bad she must want that bastard to feel helpless, just like all the children did he ordered taken from their families. She must want that even worse for little Rosie claiming her entire heart. Goodness, the horror she must have went through, finding out about the whole affair ...

Meanwhile the former Ministry Secretary only continues to give her looks of funny regret, his glances downright sighing lines like _what_ _a shame I didn't have you on my list when you were young._

Skillfully, she severs a thin strand of smooth, light hair and levitates it into a mug of Polyjuice with a practised flick of her wrist. After stirring the damping brewage she finds it perfect and puts it down on the table between her best friend and the incarnate threat to her daughter's life.

 _He doesn't have a soul._ Harry knew that for a fact when he finally got to see the other.

Alas, still before that, the first thought that sprang to his mind was of all things the name of _Malfoy_. Having barely stepped over the threshold of the interrogation room, Harry found himself caught off guard by who was waiting for him there. The sight confused him dearly for a split second long and threw him emotionally back like fifteen years into the past. Then he frowned angrily upon this useless connection, but truly, Aebischer's resemblance to that particular wizarding clan is striking; he's basically a Senior Malfoy with his boy son's prissy hairstyle.

By then Harry remembered why he'd never wanted to look at the man's Prophet headlines: The association, the stale dissappointment coming back with it ...

It's a shame this bagful of shit ex-classmate is the one Harry immediately thought of in this situation, not Peggy Fawn. He's so ashamed. But, Harry _did_ promise that git he would help him through his trial. He promised he'd help, and Draco Malfoy bailed on him like that giant coward arse he's always been. It's years since Harry wondered what else but an inglorious tail-between-the-legs act he'd even expected. Ten years ago, ( _no wait, it was nine_ ) that's when Lucius settled in his Azkaban cell and Draco chickened out of everything for good, never to be seen again.

What an unpleasant distraction. Harry doesn't need that now.

Determined, he lifts the mug of Polyjuice to his lips and downs its disgusting content. With the last gulp swallowed he feels infected as if he drank disease.

Aebischer's eyes are too blue. Over the rim of the mug Harry sees that one feature again that sets the criminal apart. They are too vibrant. Too _unafraid_. There would always be the flicker of fear behind the smugness of a Malfoy's glance, one just had to tickle it out. Not here in Aebischer's. There is no ground to stir and unsettle, just flat, hard confidence.

Harry remembers Draco Malfoy's eyes. They were honest with him that last time he saw him, even if only for a moment. Or at least so he had thought.

The Polyjuice starts working Harry's limbs through even before he puts the mug back down. This stomach upsetting sensation would never grow on him: Surreal to undergo, Harry's legs stretch out until the kneecaps hit the table, his arms lengthen. Fingers and toes are tingling from within his bones. He can feel his torso elongating – Aebischer is tall – and just so he feels all the smaller mentally, caught inside this growing body. His cheeks and forehead pulsate with change, his muscles angry all through his face. He blinks new eyelids and frowns new brows. His lips swell up like from a blow.

And that's that. He's done in this room. Somehow it will not explain itself to Harry how quickly this meeting went. He wasn't prepared to just be _done_. He didn't even say something yet -

Desperate suddenly, Harry can only hope his final glare will somehow translate the whole amount of hatred and disgust he's nursing for the devil across from him, because he cannot find the words that would relieve his soul. He doesn't think that they exist, to be honest, now that he thinks about it. All day, worn down by waiting, he didn't see this moment as a chance to let go of what happened to himself and Peggy back then, not until now that the chance is past. Rather he was paralized inside, and still feels no better. Fact is, Harry won't have business with Aebischer ever again after he left this room, and he highly doubts he'd have the heart to confront the man privately in Azkaban. He's just grown much too soft for many things nowadays.

This burden of guilt that he carries, it stays with him. He cannot give it back. That's a slap in the face he didn't even know he should be dodging. It's not right, and yet it's how it's going to be.

So he glares. Even if only that.

It's odd to behold, but Aebischer only seems to be amused by his own face seething at him. Like that's the most unlikely sight he's ever seen.

Harry is so done in here. His palms are damp and cold.

Out in the corridor, Ron and Hermione crowd in on him. Goodness are they short right now, even Ron. Half a head down. It's weirding Harry out.

They help him change his now too small clothes into rich Secretary robes: Hermione gives Harry's sneakers a wandwave and they're perfect-fit leather shoes, and Ron tuggs at the sleeves of the sweater which turns into an ankle-long, dark, woolen gown with finer shirt and trousers underneath just then.

“'kay, mate, now look a bit, I don't know, more like you're happy to be yourself?”

“Well, funny”, speaks another man's voice from Harry's mouth, which is right now not even really Harry's.

“I know but, yeah, that's better. Like you despise everything and love it so much.”

“Guess that's not hard with this visage.”

Ron shrugs, the good-hearted disguise of humor faltering. Still he's not at all content with Harry's decision to do this, and it shows. And it stings.

Hermione wrings her hands. “You've got the place?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. You've got one hour, remember that!”

“Hermione, I've remembered that in second year at Hogwarts. Really now.”

“Fine. Good. So you're there, and you've got one hour. Whom do you speak to?”

“Laurent Oldland, Beast Keeper. Mione, I'll be fine.”

“I know, I know, sorry. But repeat the password, please. One more time.”

Tense and tired all the same, Harry sighs, willing himself to allow his friends the worry he will not allow himself to feel.

“It's Dérkomai. As in greek for _I see_ , further leading to _drácon_ , dragon. _I want to see the dragon_ , figuratively speaking.”

Just saying this out loud, Harry is disgusted by the pomp of it. Reminds him all too much of that _I am Lord Voldemort_ vanity bullshit. Always this kind of bullshit. Shaking his head, he adds that as an afterthought: “Why does evil always want to be so smart?”

Finally, Hermione smiles again. “It just thinks it is. That's its weakness.”

Then Ron's hand grabs his shoulder reassuringly.

“I'm apparating you”, he decides (once again), and who is Harry to blame anyone for mistrusting his apparition abilities? “I stay behind where we arrive. If you're not out of that place in an hour I go in.”

“Alright, thanks.”

“Great, just a second and we're off.”

Taking some last orders from Robards, Ron opts the both of them officially out. Hermione takes the chance to forget all formalities and hugs Harry tightly.

“Be safe”, she says.

Harry can only hesitantly return the embrace. Seeing her in Aebischer's arms, not to mention them being his own, it's a bit too much for him to process right now, and for Ron as well as tells his unsettled look and the thick way that he swallows when he turns back to them.

Hermione steps away, gives Ron a peck and Harry a stiff wave goodbye. Ron's hand comes down on Harry's shoulder again and they're gone.

The apparition distorts the two of them, a moment long Harry feels like he is falling into a caleidoscope, then the tug behind his navel directs him safely beside his friend to where they're headed. Harry smells the dank, harsh night air of Knockturn Alley before it even touches his skin.

It must have rained earlier in London. Yes, it actually did. Harry remembers he saw it through the window and didn't pay it any mind.

The dragon down in the arena will not have had the chance to see the rain. Or just hear it. Smell it. Feel it on its scales. The dragon will be shut away from the whole wide world and robbed off its birthright to fly.

Finding purpose in himself again, Harry straightens his spine and takes a deep breath. This is what he's here for, not for tragedies past which no one can ever undo.

It's only fitting he should wear the body of the man who sold this being to the bars. In his disguise he'll set it free again.

 

 


	4. To the arena

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 _OLDLAND'S ODDITIES_ , reads the weathered metal plate above the scuffed old door, maroon-painted wood with a triangular window in the top of it. The shop is crouching as awkwardly as a plotting servant between two taller buildings that look like they would think they'd command the whole dark street. Obviously though, this is a fraud. The people who have chosen this shabby place to hide their secret attraction thought well on appearances to people who are less accustomed to the dirty ways of Knockturn Alley.

Harry wrinkles his nose. He can't even begin to wonder how a dragon should actually fit in a cramped building's basement like this. There must be some greater catacombs attached, or size manipulating spells, or ones he wouldn't even think of. Resourceful folk, the people selling and buying here.

There's faintest light behind the blind glass of the window in the door, hardly distinguishable but definitely there. As watched as Harry feels out here, it seems all other shops around have closed around this time of the night. This strikes him odd, he would have thought Knockturn Alley to be open at all times, selling the bad wares in daylight and the worse when shadows fall.

Or maybe his eyes are just not yet adjusted to have Aebischer's diopters, not his disastrous own, and maybe there's that faint corpse light also shining in all the other gaping windows and if only he concentrated on them he'd be able to see their appalling lure as well.

Now that he thought about it he thinks he can. A shiver runs down his spine.

As Harry lets himself in to ODDITIES, not a bell chimes but a shrunken head right next to the opening side of the door noisily vomits a clump of gold into a bowl – probabyl fay gold, as no one possessing a gold spitting whatever would ever have to work again. However, Harry jumps at the sound. The creeps have not yet spiked through his extremities as he hears some ugly chuckle from behind a greasy shelf stuffed with hundreds of objects obscured by the darkness and seeming to be covered in finger thick layers of dust.

“Got that one new, aye. Nice, isn'it?”

Harry curses inwardly at how close that was – had this shrunken head been here before, surely the real Aebischer wouldn't get a fright of it. He's got to get a grip and jump into character immediately.

With a fake smirk in his voice he drawls: “Not my type of interest, but suit yourself.”

From behind the shelf treads forth a slightly hunched figure whom Harry must assume to be Laurent Oldland, owner of the shop and the dragon business under it. The faint light comes from a lonely glowing hinkypunk he's carrying around in a jam jar. Scoffing, Harry promises himself to think of rescuing this little guy as well once they've got the auror raid going.

Laurent lifts the jar to his face, intending to get a look at Harry's – Aebischer's – face and so giving Harry a much too detailed look at his own: The man is quite plainly just ugly. Ugly in a way Harry hasn't seen before. It's worrysome even, as in he would think the man suffers from a painful syndrome distorting his bone structure or the like. It's as if the skull's too slim, too long. The eyes are nearly on the level of two sloppy ears, just higher set. There are frightening nostrils and teeth and missing teeth to talk about, too, but Harry rather doesn't stare. He's supposed to know this man. So he smiles, trying his best to reproduce the obnoxious mirth that he was only moments ago in the interrogation room forced to bear from whom he's impersonating now. He hopes he's got the gleeful crow's feet wrinkles right which so enraged him.

“Now there”, purrs Laurent hoarsely as he creeps closer, all of a sudden oozing a menace that would scare old Filch. “What _are_ we interested in, eh?”

That's the test. It's started now.

“I am interested”, Harry pronounces, “in the Beast Keeper showing me to his pet.” And if his stomach isn't lurching around itself from the slimy grin he placed on top of his words then the sun is a square.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh … _is_ that so, eh?”

From that unfortunate exhale Harry is left breathing in the thick, warm breath of the other man; it's heavy with rot, but also with dozens of different herbs and tinctures Harry would never dare identify. It's nothing alcoholic, though, and the beady eyes glaring challengingly into his soul are alert like a hyena's. Whatever with, the man is pimped. Obviously not being after outward alteration, Laurent must be investing his whole dubious potions knowledge in enhancing himself otherwise. Probably in power. Defense. Sniffing out the validity of his customers … he's not to be fucked with, so much is clear.

Harry tries not to retch. He means to be sensing a subtle kind of magic probing his aura, but he can't be sure if suspecting the Knockturn scarecrow able of wandless magic is a bit far fetched and he himself is only being nervours. Instinct tells him both to back off and get out of that plume of stink, so he decides to demonstrate, just gently, how he's superior to the other, as he believes a man like Aebischer would do in this situation.

Harry straightens and shakes his head teasingly as he looms, tutting the other.

“ _Dérkomai_ , my dear Laurent. I am not the most patient tonight.”

The Beast Keeper's eyes shrink to suspicious slits for a beat, and he draws the silent tension out just a little longer - Harry's pulse grows fast – until he downright explodes in cackles and spits all over the place, patting Harry's elbow too hard.

“Not patient, eh?! Let's go then, shall we?”

Relieved that his disguise was bought but uneasy from Laurent's giggles as well, Harry only has a second to wonder if he missed a joke here. Meanwhile, Laurent scurries quicker than Harry would have thought possible around boxes and shelves and other bits and bobs to the back of the hopelessly stacked little shop. The floorboards protest under Harry's expensive shoes as he tries to keep up. Greedily, Laurent pulls a dull wall-hanging aside which spews a cloud of mildew and dust. Behind it is a door hidden. It's locked with a simple iron lock. The key to it looks ancient. Laurent's fingers around it are like a fossilized crab with its legs curled inward in death.

A simple, narrow stairwell leads down about seven steps, then turns, delves nine down again and lets both the hobbling Beast Keeper and Harry out into a simple, narrow room which couldn't look more like an ordinary storage room. The ceiling is close to Harry's scalp. Wooden boxes, boxes, boxes, nothing else. Spiderwebs in corners, just as they would be. The walls are bare where they peak through, the stones they're made of rough from time. There's nothing here. And yet somehow Harry is nervously flexing his wrist to feel the holster of his wand.

He makes out a cupboard, a glance over his shoulder makes him see it: Under the stairs. _The irony._ Only for a fraction of time Harry returns into his childhood, under his own stairs, to Petunia's shrill voice and Vernon's – deftly, Laurent pulls the creaking door of the cupboard open. A protecting spell breaks tangibly. Inside it's empty, no boy there and no bed, just another door instead of a back or the blank wall.

But this second door has Harry's breath catch in his throat.

It's a Gringotts vault he'd say if he didn't know it better; the metal work is rigorous with a body very likely two feet strong. It's heavily hung shut by a complicated structure of locks gripping into one another. These locks form an ever moving pattern of iron strings and knots that worm towards the center of the door hungrily like elongated maggots for the dead; a buckle of metal sits there and holds a tiny keyhole. On the surface of the door, where shadows of the net of repulsive locks are flitting about, countless runes are engraved and painted with something black. Something that might have once been red. This whole hidden door enates the sickening smell and pulse of dark magic, it's like a fist to the guts now that it's being bared.

This is a lot of magical effort for a dragon. The door alone, thick as it very likely is, would have sufficed, but this? Surely a lot of effort to keep some vulgar animal fights covered as well. Whatever creature they are hiding here, it must be costly beyond measure. They wouldn't want it to be found, not to mention stolen.

They wouldn't want it to die in animal fights.

Harry swallows, his own saliva thick with ozone. Frowning, he gets more suspicious by the moment and feels a dreadful anticipation crawling up his spine.

Laurent doesn't produce another key for this keyhole. He sticks his tongue in it. The locks stop squirming. A snapping sound cascades from the center to the outer corners of the door, the runes glow brightly for a second – red – and then the magic seems deflated from the whole installment. One could just put their hands on top of the flat metal buckle and push now probably.

Before he does just so, Laurent turns around, facing Harry with disgusting fun shining from his eyes. His mouth is leering as he licks the upper row of his teeth.

“Wild or whiny tonight, sir?”

Harry decides with finality that this does absolutely not sound like animal fighting. He barely manages to refrain from closing his eyes against the attack of perverted ideas storming his mind – ideas of what secret time a person would want to spent with a creature locked away and stored like a diamond.

_Wild of whiny._

This business must be about abuse, torture maybe, or, God forbid, bestiality.

Harry doesn't know what to do. With animal fights, well he would have stood by and watched, there is always a crowd for that, he'd have acted as if investing in the affair, acted as if frustrated by losing or the like. Just something to get him in and out of here again. But if this is what he thinks it's going to be, Harry will have to ill-use the creature on the other side of this door. He'd blow his cover if he didn't.

Just short of panicking, Harry violently focusses and grins at the piece of filth in front of him, he's getting sick from it, sure, but it's the best he brings out right now. He doesn't trust the voice-over spell to not break from the strain of anger that's building an unbearable force in his chest and can only hope his face is telling enough for an answer.

Laurent is satisfied. Harry wants to smash his remaining teeth in.

“The usual, I see … just let me prep him up, was a rough day for the boy.”

_That means wild I suppose._

With that said, the door is pushed open – Laurent groans, the hinges screech - and a cold blast comes forth from the unnatural darkness opening up … with the sound of a whip slitting down on flesh. From this, a contorted outcry shoots directly through Harry's arteries into his feet and numbs them on the spot.

Laurent titters with a grin as he slips into the dark. Harry might just be fainting, but the door falls shut again before he can fall, and the boom of it is painful to the ear and forcing his mind alert to extremes. It's completely silent again, but Harry only realizes that a heartbeat delayed, for his system still rings with that unexpected, pain-stricken sound. Something was off with it, something …

Then instinct kicks in and tells him to hurry and just _help_ , somehow, but before his hands even touch the door there's a hiss, and like snakes the locks snap back into motion.

Left alone in the cupboard under the stairs, Harry swallows hard. His breath is whistling. He swallows again to silence himself. Slowly, helplessly, he takes as many steps back as the little space in the storage room will allow, and once his back has hit a dusty wooden ware box he's not wiser than before.

But there's someone in that other room. Someone with a whip. That tells Harry, whatever the nature of these dubious appointments with the dragon, Laurent is not usually watching them. Harry will not be watched. He'll get in there, wait up his given time, and he could heal the dragon, he knows _some_ healing charms, and then, well, maybe he'll just jump Laurent the moment he'd come for Harry to leave. He'd jump him off guard and render the building taken by the Ministry. He'd take Laurent and his next client into custody, if there is to be another one tonight. It's the only way. Because harming the dragon himself and pensieving the sight of it, that's useless proof material. And Harry wouldn't _do_ it. He couldn't do it.

Surely Ron will understand.

… Laurent called the dragon _boy_ , did he?

Already Harry's mind is wildly looking through the catalogue of male dragons he memorised earlier, hoping to find one species he could imagine fitting the absurd interest it's facing here: Kept for single-conducted abuse, people pay for it, and probably highly, so it's got to be worth a price – but - what for, just fun? Unlikely, this is too big a deal for mere animal cruelty as a hobby. There could be something beneficial from, dare he say, the bodily fluids of the kept beast. Like unicorn blood. There must be something special about it, so much is sure. Alas, that's the point from which Harry's mind is a blank space. He just repeats the word _boy_ , finding nothing beyond the secret meaning of it that it's tauntingly denying him.

With a jolt, the heavy door is janked ajar from within. The locks hiss out but give under the force from that side. Not Laurent emerges, however, but a stout man in his mid-sixties, clad in expensive looking attire; a man with a livid face and bone-deep hatred oozing from his eyes.

Freezing, Harry realizes that he knows this man.

His name is Keynsten. He was an honourable Auror, even worked side by side with Harry once back then. That's until he moved up to the top of the Ministry, becoming an important and passionate ambassador of peace. His wife and sons had fallen victims to the war's then dying yet still vengeful aftermath. Harry'd attempted their funerals to pay his respect to the senior civil servant. He'd inspired Harry deeply.

Harry wanted to be like him.

It is this man rolling in on Harry like a bull on fire righ now, or at least this is how someone else chose to look: It's not impossible that others come here under the shield of Polyjuice as well.

“There there”, spits the so-called Keynsten then, and Harry could connect his fist with the face crawling too close into his own because he _knows_ that voice to be Keynsten's voice, and it's either he has willingly given it to some perverted bastard for this enterprise, which is ridiculous, or he was forced to, which is with his wide influence even less possible, so it's just plain and simply his glorious animal torturing self having a temper tantrum right under Harry's nose.

He'd find excuses, he'd tell himself that surely Keynsten's here to investigate himself, that he's just hating Aebischer's face that covers Harry's own. _He doesn't recognize me._

But that _whip_ , or whatever it even was. Harry did hear what a bloodcurdling cry it caused.

Good graces, Harry wanted to be like this man. The disappointment hits him without mercy.

Bitter, he grits his teeth so hard he fears he might break one out as he endures this oh so honourable piece of shite spitting in his eyes as he rants away: “Always steal my time, hu? Showin' up early, that's your thing, hu? You think you've got these special rights on him, but I tell you, you SOLD him and he's NOT yours anymore! Laurent's such a coward, licking your arse out like that! I'm very able to buy me weeks in here, you understand? And yet you've got nothing better to do than to mess with my schedule. I do not know in what extent you still profit from this business, Aebischer, but be aware it's missing out GALLEONS with me. This was the last time I let myself be mucked around, and I knew you're coming, I was done with him on point, and _made_ I sure to be done. Have _fun_ tonight.”

Time grew slow and sticky with Harry's disbelief just a second there, and as it goes cannoning back to here and now, he finds he's got problems breathing in again; Keynsten gives him a final hateful glare and spits at his feet before he turns for the stairs as one grimly satisfied but eager to leave the site of a perfect crime.

_Fuck._

The dragon is dead.

_No -_

Like that, Keynsten is forgotten. Harry darts into motion with his pulse in his ears, desperate to thwart his worst expectations. But as he goes for the nightmarish door, images flash across his thumping vision, a wicked mixture of all that haunts him at once – little Peggy in her blood, so much of her blood, so _much_ , and there's Aebischer for the blink of an eye. He's smiling.

That moment Harry knows how wrong he was to think he'd manage this job. It's already overwhelming him and makes his senses play him tricks.

The swirling, hissing ropes of metal decide to make room for him as he hammers his hands on the door, calling Laurent to open up already. From the touch of the runes, dark magic soaks Harry's arms up to the elbows with a tingling sensation of pain. Or maybe he's just failing under his panic.

Just let it not yet be too late, just let him _make_ it this time, that's the only concern eating him up right now, and god, it's getting cold in Harry's stomach, and it's getting darker in the room, or is it … ? He shakes his head, shakes his weakness off his back. It grabs him tightly.

 _Keynsten wouldn't have the guts,_ Harry tells himself, _he wouldn't get away with it, this business must be bigger than one ego._

“LAURENT!”

Just, what if the Beast Keeper lies killed behind this door as well?

Harry hammers harder still, pounding his fists and flat palms. Sweat stands on his temples and he already wants to draw his wand when finally the cursed door is pulled a gap-wide open. The puller's effort from within slowing the motion and Harry's dramatic urgency seem to produce a vicious kind of undertow into the crack of complete blackness revealing itself – from which also the visage of Laurent shoves out. It is contorted with anger and irritation.

“Whassat fuss, eh?! Went to plan, or didn'it?!”

Skipping a too long breath, Harry feels his brow furrowing at the other man.

It's in the weirdest piece of conversation he's ever made that he learns about how Aebischer was apparently supposed to actually put Keynsten off for good: Someone else was too interested in his spot of the week to keep him around, someone willing to pay more. Laurent snorts about _special wishes_ for the coming arrangement, finding what remains unsaid about it really funny. It upsets Harry's stomach only more. That and the brooding silence from the dark creeping behind Laurent's back.

“But the dragon”, Harry stupidly bursts out, “is it alright?”

Not that a _no_ would be in question anyway, because how would this new client get his money's worth if the centerpiece of his ideas was actually dead? Harry hates himself once he sputtered about so thoughtlessly. He grits his teeth to force himself back into his rational mind, into his very real and very important undercover mission he must not blow for some irrational shivers of despairing fear. Just because it was Aebischer, all of this – and Peggy, too ... he shouldn't ever have allowed himself to make this _personal_ , damn! Because the true Aebischer wouldn't have worried where Harry just did, that was stupid and unprofessional of him. He's fucking this up.

Pursing his lips, he trains his face to reflect the tickled indifference he hoped to showcase since he entered the shop, but he's not hoping for much anymore; Laurent must have seen through him. He sure must suspect him to be fishy at the least.

So being on his guard, Harry lets the tip of his wand slip into his palm. If he really managed to ruin the job already he better be prepared to make the best of his mess.

He does get a curious look from the other which lasts a lot longer than it should, but then merely a dismissive shrug will follow. However, the hesitance of it keeps Harry in alarm.

“I'll set him up jus' right”, says Laurent and means his dragon, “always do, you might remember.”

Sullenly then, the ugly bastard wants to slip backwards and let the door shut on Harry again, which Harry decides will not do _._ He braces both his hands against the hostile surface of it and catches the heavy fall. Laurents halts, completely bugged, but if he's smelling something then he doesn't let it show.

Harry just won't risk getting locked out for good, not now, so much is sure.

With an arched brow, he nods inside.

“Let me see for myself if you're wasting my time.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last cliffhanger before the "great reveal" - which, as far as I am guessing, won't come as much of a surprise, I mean could I be more obvious as to what will happen next? I hope you enjoyed the build-up thus far, this story is really very dear to me and has me in a vulnerable writing state without the usual straightforward smut to hide behind.
> 
> As always, comments are like air to breathe ~
> 
>  
> 
> For updates in between or progress messages follow my [TUMBLR](https://selfdestructian.tumblr.com)


	5. Dragon, Dragon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **WARNINGS:**  
>  _visual gore, psychological horror, body mutilation, mental breakdown_  
>   
> 
> This chapter was hard to write. It's the worst I'll push the angst/horror elements of this story, and even though a distinct taste of bitterness will cling to the sweets of future chapters, things can only get better now. I hope you'll stay for that.
> 
> [This instrumental piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaRNAPSUKc) was my unending muse. Headphones on and loop if you wish to have a proper reading soundtrack. It's worth it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Harry is not under the shop anymore. He renders that impossible immediately. There must have been a transportation at the threshold of the door, and a powerful one because he wouldn't even notice any. Just, his senses tell him that he walked way farther than one step should carry.

The first thing he takes in on the other side is the gripping but motionless cold. The air is humid and smelling of granite. The dark around him won't let him make out the actual size of the room, or rather what must be the place that Aebischer referred to as the arena, Harry reminds himself. There is that distinct feeling to it, however, that give you hall-like caves which dwarf you to a mere grain of dust in their hold. The echoes of Harry's steps say the same. It's a catacomb, so much is every nerve in his body telling; a catacomb with a ceiling so high you couldn't glimpse it even with Lumos Maxima praying at its most hopeful and desperate for day to return.

So all this shrouded magnitude reveals no corner of itself from the pitch black that it's donned - except for one broad circle of light hitting the floor ahead. It's blinding Harry so that his eyes water from the sharp outline of it. And it bugs him where it might be coming from. But a moment later his vision gets used to the crass surroundings and actually does make out a ceiling, covered in gigantic stalactites from amidst which a hole lets daylight seep into the cave's belly. Yet it's like miles above Harry's head. The light itself thins out unnaturally up high in contrast to how thick it lies on the dusty, wild stone floor. There must be a spell at work again that sucks the brightness deeper down than it would fall on its own. It's all giving the whole scene an intimidating touch of wrongness.

With the tips of his shoes at the border of the light, Harry stands one moment, relucting to leave the shelter of darkness just yet. Under the sleeves of his robes the fine arm hairs stand on end. He's gripping the tip of his wand tightly; at the slightest sign of danger he'd shake it out into action. Just one moment, though, one moment, then he'll urge himself on again, because surely Aebischer would be familiar with this place and sure enough he wouldn't hesitate to step into the center of its attention.

Meanwhile there's Laurent, continuously mumbling and sighing to himself (like Kreacher does the most on Sundays), and he's sauntering carelessly into the bright circle as if it was his living room. That he shows his back to Harry so willfully must be a good sign after all. It takes him around twenty of his lopsided strides to reach the middle of the light where a big, heavy, rusty hook is driven into the ground that reaches up to the man's thighs. From that hook dangles a delicate chain which snakes away into the shades – and this hook and this chain must be there to always locate the beast kept in here, even if it tried to hide away in the shadows like it must be trying right now.

But to grant the illusion of safety only to mock it so, it's disgusting. That a creature's allowed to obscure itself, only to have it know it cannot hide, they'd always find it. Harry balls his fists for the obscene decadence of this installment.

Strangely only now, behind Harry's back the cursed door falls shut with a boom that would make the voice of destiny. Harry's heart jumps into his throat and he suddenly feels far away from Ron and the aurors and the mission at all, getting so close to its core.

It's then that he makes out that the smudge he's mistaken for a shadow thrown by the hook is actually a pool of fresh blood.

Thankfully, there's not so much of it, at least not for a dragon: An adult having lost this amount would be fine. Eventually Harry steps into view and slowly nears the blood to look for footprints, but he cannot find any. However, he wonders with a sting to the heart if the poor thing on the chain could be a chick rather than an adult, because even if not footprints he can clearly make out smeary traces, random patterns thinning the scarlet puddle in wild streaks towards the shadows, and they do indicate movement of limbs. Limbs wich should be small. Aebischer didn't tell how long this business runs already, but what a human infant grows in one year, some dragons will grow in a decade, so the assumption is not at all far-fetched. If it's a chick then the amount of blood would be a whole different story again.

Harry swallows thickly and strains his ears to hear the weakest rasp of breath from where the chain is pointing. But in spite of Laurent's noises the silence is complete.

“Hides again, the silly”, grumbles said man while his weirdly shaped head is shaking right to left. He makes a show as if having the most exhausting argument with an unruly child ahead of him. Exasperated, he groans and stoops to snatch the chain in his claw-like hands. He rattles it softy, calling out in a sing-song parody of kindness: “Dragon, dragon … are you there?”

Silence is there. With growing concern, Harry frowns into the dark, but it's no use.

Then Laurent hisses something ugly and yanks the chain, harder this time, until it spans taut from an invisible resistance; a weak, gargled sound squeaks from the obscured other end of it, and – _wait, ..._ just a terrifying heartbeat long Harry is fooled into believing that this little sound, this time, was human made.

But it canot be.

It wouldn't be.

Hysterical, he glances down to check if the ground is still solid under his feet. He cannot decide wether to be relieved that it is or to be scared out of his mind at how strongly his body threatens him to just give up if any other shock should bite him in the face tonight. Because one moment he thought he would be falling. Harry was sure of it.

In front of him, Laurent remains oblivious to his struggle: That instant he's releasing the tension on the chain again to grant his beast the chance of showing obedience instead of being dragged out of it's hole.

“There now … dragon, dragon, come to me. Come, boy” he lurs, and the usage of the term _boy_ is getting dramatically unbearable for Harry's fickle state of mind. Again, there's that heartrending sob, high-pitched, muffled and wet, like from a mouth produced that's full of blood … which is such a repulsive impression, Harry firmly stands the theory of the dragon chick, or maybe an adult of stunted growth, _anything_ explaining the weak pitch and small range of the sounds.

Everything else would be insane.

As with the second whine still no motion will stir in the dark, Laurent loses his temper again. His rant adopst a heavily accusing edge: “What's the _matter_ with you, eh?” He punctuates his demand with wild yanking on the chain. “Mister Abe here came all the way to see you, brat! Don't wanna be nasty now, do you, hu? Come HERE I say!”

There is a period of painful yelps in sync with each of Laurent's pulls, each of which drive Harry to flinch more. The last almost spills tears from his eyes. Quickly, he blinks them away, dreading the Beast Keeper to turn around and see his desperate sympathy: Aebischer wouldn't have sympathy. He'd probably smile.

Christ, Harry wants to _gut_ that devil.

Not to worry, though, Laurent is wholly absorbed by his disciplinary measures and started shaking his head again, hissing something to himself about _how ungrateful they can be sometimes and ..._

Then, with a bone-freezing chill, Harry hears the first proper reply from the shadows.

“I'm sorry”, blubbers someone between gasps and sobs, “I can't – I'm sorry!“

Harry's world might break in two, but there is no dragon that can talk. Aebischer's in human trafficking. That's his profession. He sold the dragon to Laurent. He said he did, Keynsten said he did.

Oh good graces, could Harry have been so stupid to begin with? Did Robards suspect this to happen? Or Ron? Hermione? Why didn't Harry see this coming?

They thought of a trap, some dubious way to buy Aebischer time or something, and _god,_ this is a trap, but not how they expected it to be, this is a trap set by life itself because life just really seems to fucking hate Harry Potter so much.

The dragon is no dragon. They keep a person down here.

Just, why? Harry's at a loss, completely. Who would, what for, what – _whom?_

 _Boy_ , Harry stupidly reminds himself. Laurent calls him _boy_. It's a boy. The voice is too old for a child, though, too young for a man, and this nightmare doesn't get any realer at all.

Harry can't handle this. Already his hands are growing numb and sweat stands on his temples. The corners of his vision turn a toxic kind of blurred. His stomach rebels and his eyes fall to the floor again, fall to the pool of blood again – his mind slips and falls and drowns in it. He can smell it now, heavier and thicker than before. It's clogging up his nostrils and he cannot _breathe_.

But there is stubbornness left in him if all else fails.

Harry grinds his teeth hard against the overpowering of sickness dragging him down. He's got to stay strong, pull this through and go home – he's not supposed to do anything else than what he would have done for a dragon, in fact he's doing it this instant, gathering proof material to give this mission into able hands. He can do that. He's only got to stick to the plan, or whatever the plan even was, wait for Ron, anything. They'd come for him worst case. It would be alright, if only he stayed strong now. Harry could collapse and hug himself later at home. Because he would go home, he _will_ , he'll make it through this hell and then go home and -

“What, you can't?!” Laurent shouts like a pistol in a church, and Harry flinches harder still.

“I can't walk!” The pleading voice is literally in tears now, and the words are coming out like clumpy sponges soaked with agony and fear.

“Oh you _silly_ boy! Did you break your bones again?!”

Stricktly, Harry tries to shield himself against the brutal absurdity of that accusation. Keynsten's promise from earlier hammers his memory, of how he made sure to be done here. _Shit_ , Harry feels he's got to put more distance between himself and what he's observing or else he'll get a stroke from the war of nausea and fury tearing at his innards.

Just, it's getting worse.

“But Mister Key”, laments the dragon with that heavy slur of speech, “he said he likes the sound, please, I was good!”

“You better were! And now I've to fix you up, 'cause how will you be fun for Mister Abe with your broken bones? You thought about that? Eh? You better be grateful I'm having you at all!”

“Thank you, Laurent. I'm sorry.”

“Come out there now, and quick, my patience for you ends today!”

“But, I can't walk-”

“Then you will crawl!”

A vociferous cry of pain cuts the air from the final yank Laurent gives the chain with both his hands. Then, under heavy, gurgling pants for breath, the sounds of someone awkwardly crawling disturb the looming dark ahead. It's undoing essencial things in Harry's soul. A great fear seizes him in his paralized body, the most irrational fear that humans can produce: The fear of the victim.

Harry has always been courageous and still is to this day. But risking yourself, that's just so different than having to see someone else on the brink. Harry can take a wound, he can take on death, damn, he already _did_ that. But since little Peggy died he can't see people die. He cannot stomach it. That takes so much more strength than Harry posesses.

He doesn't want the dragon to come out. He refuses him with every terrified fibre of his body. He wants this situation to be over, to stop, _now_ , but it won't be over before the dragon comes out; and he will. He's struggling his way on, every little noise that he makes ripping larger holes into Harry's last shred of resolve.

After what feels like an hour but what might have been just seconds, the horrible anticipating is done: On the level of Laurent's filthy boots, a bald head pops into the light, and in the blink of an eye Harry's tongue is dry and cold. Ice cold. His blood seems to be shrieking in his ears. Only with force he manages to draw another breath. But he wouldn't faint now. The state he finds himself dissolving into goes way beyond that.

The dragon is naked. His skin emits a sickly pallor as it throws the too bright light back into the air like its touch would be hurting him. He's so white, so _red,_ and black and purple blotches colour him everywhere. The dragon is covered in blood, in bruises and open wounds. He's starved, worrysomely thin, and his head is not just bald, it's roughly shaven bare. There are fresh cuts all over his scalp, bleeding or already clumping up with still soft crusts. His face is a swollen mess from which two wild, wild eyes are staring nowhere, so pale they could be blind.

He appears to be crippled on first sight. One moment Harry assumes he has no arms at all because of the way he's dragging himself along on the floor; somewhat sideways, using only his forehead and hipbones to produce a deeply bewildering kind of caterpillar movement that heaves his body like a useless weight further and further with what looks to be incredible strain. He's shaking so much, Harry's focus betrays him, showing him the person two- or threefolds like twitching ghosts overlapping each other.

Detached somehow, Harry shuts his eyes for a number of heartbeats long. When he opens them again, his sight is sharp. The dragon has pulled himself to Laurent's feet at last and collapsed there. Tremors run through his bizarrely distorted form, and his breath is whistling through red bubbles popping out of his mouth.

Now that he's lying still, he resembles a big bird without feathers more than anything. He's holding his arms folded back behind himself in the weirdest angle, as if they would be locked in a cramp, but they're definitely there. Alas, before Harry can even pinpoint what looks so disgustingly wrong with that poisture, he notices a big metal ring dangling vertically from the dragon's beat up mouth, boldly parting his slick, red lips that wobble on its surface. Maybe it's driven through his jaw, maybe running along under his tongue as he was well able to speak. The ring is seeming to come out again at the bottom of his chin. On this ring the chain from the hook is attached. Laurent still holds it in his hands.

Momentarily, this connection has Harry feeling like he'd fall again, but he doesn't even register that. A screeching part of him is boding something terrible to happen if he just looked on. His eyes are caught. He wants to avert them unless they split because they feel like they must _split_ , but there is more to see.

Yes, something's wrong with the arms, and now Harry begins to comprehend exactly what. Behind the dragon's back his elbows are bound together to extremes with what looks like a leather strap, cutting for blood. His shoulders are ... merely two big, dark purple notches; to force the arms into their stilted pose, they must have been yanked from their sockets. They lie flat across his shoulderblades, meeting at the bottom of his spine.

 _Like a pair of wings_ , Harry muses, and his face is going numb.

It's just the most striking feature of this work of hate, only the start of it. The hands, too, add to the carricature of a winged beast. Wrists broken, the dragon's palms are pressed against his pulse points of both forearms, which in turn are tucked sharply along the upper on his back, again bound fast with straps. Then his _fingers_ … they, with their extraordinary look, have Harry nearly throw up where he stands. They are, no doubt, treated with a curse, elongated and reaching far behind the elbows where they cross as feathers would. Some of them are standing out in odder angles, crushed under the heels of Keynsten's expensive leather boots for sure. Also, there are fragile skins added to the spaces between them, and just as magic had them grow, violence must have torn them apart again. They're dragonwings in shreds.

_But this is a person. You're a person._

If only this poorest of souls would die where he lies so this torture might find an instant end. An outdrawn moment in time, Harry wishes for this to happen like he rarely wished for anything, and maybe even more for his own sake than the victim's. Then he numbly wonders how one would be concious through this amount of physical trauma anyway, and out of sheer bewilderment he settles on spellwork again: Designed to keep one aware, no matter the pain. No escape from it, no escape, not even in complete exhaustion.

Laurent absentmindedly toys with the chain as he crouches down, considering the injured at his feet with a lazy grin as if this wouldn't even be the worst he's seen. And the chain, it's gleaming, rattling, a dormant threat just in itself ...

 _Hide in the dark_ , flickers uselessly through Harry's mind, _but they will always find you._ His thoughts are slow as sinking sand in water.

“Dear, dear, are _you_ a sight,” chuckles Laurent down on his prisoner, petting the flinching head that rests at his boots, careless of all the cuts he opens again. “You know what? I think you have been good after all.“

Eagerly, the dragon nods with a convulsive sob bubbling from his throat.

That moment Harry lifts his wand. The action comes naturally to him, and calmly, without a second thought to what he's trying to do … he just knows he should do something right. There's too much _wrong_. Something, just _anything_ should counterbalance that. But his body won't be calm. His hand is shaking. Violently. With a defeated frown carving his face, which feels so conflictedly distant to his body's turmoil, Harry must accept that he can't aim like that. He'd only miss the back of Laurents head. He'd shoot the dragon. _No, that's not right._ He took Peggy Fawn's little hand and tore her in two. That was not what he meant to do. Harry would shoot the dragon.

“Have you been good? Eh?”

“Yes, please”, snivels the dragon, and his wild, wild eyes are brimming with tears.

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Alright, alright. An' what do good boys get?”

“ _Peace_ , please, Laurent.”

“A _piece of peace_ , that is right. You worked for that, boy. There.”

From the pocket of his trousers, Laurent produces a sugar cube. At least that's what it looks to be. Smug with his own benevolence, he feeds it to his pet, stuffing the little chunk almost carefully past the twitching lips – across the iron of the ring it makes a scraping sound, but this is soon sucked up by the dragon's unending gratefulness expressed through a pitiful whimper.

Once sitting on the tongue, not even bit through, the dubious treat works an enormous effect on its eater: He lets out a sigh, deeply relaxed, and his whole broken frame sinks into itself as does one delivered into immediate sleep.

Harry's arm sinks, too, as if all his confused intentions slumbered away with the dragon in font of him. He lets out a breath he knew not he held.

Laurent chuckles again, straightens himself. He points to the ground with a pinkie. He's got a weird, long, wooden looking nail on it. _Oh_. That's his wand. With a single spell, foreign to Harry's knowledge, he snaps the leather bindings on the dragon apart, whose limbs slump from him and lie where they fell, broken. _Wrong._ So, so wrong. Amused, Laurent pulls one slack, distorted arm open and fans out the wing-like fingers. Hunters do that, inspecting the game, the trophy. Artists do it, too, to get to know their materials.

“Well Keynsten, _fuck_ my horse”, he rasps with a wicked leer on his face. He shakes his head, triumph in his eyes. That Keynsten, really, thought he'd spite them, did the fool! Thought he took the last bite of the cake. He did not, apparently. To Harry's overtoppling horror, Laurent is happy with what he sees; he sees potential. Ideas. Possibilities.

Then he turns around, and he cocks his brows suggestively as he says: “How's _that_ sound? I can make him fly!”

How come the light is a weight on Harry's brow? He moves a foot, just ever so carefully, to test if the ground is still solid under him. It's hard, rough to the sole. He thinks he rubbed a crumb of chalk to dust.

But Harry disappeared somewhere. Where? In the slack palm Laurent's thumb is kneading to spread the too long fingers even more? No. No, Harry is falling. _I can make him fly._ Lower. The wrist, maybe the wrist will tell him where he went. It pulls him lower still. There is that smudge beginning on that lifeless wrist, _lower_. It is no blood. No bruise. Harry sees a snake there, and a snake that dances forth from the mouth of a skull. He sees that, but he doesn't understand. The snake doesn't tell him where he went.

_Where he went, nine years ago. Where did Draco Malfoy go?_

Laurent pulled his pet's arm so that the body moved along with that pull, so that the chest lies bared to the uncompromising light now, and it's a weight, it is. The dragon's chest, it didn't show like that before. And Harry does see a pattern of criss-crossed lines, protruding lines, hidden and accentuated by the smeary film of blood covering them. _They're older_ , Harry remarks without knowing why to compare these scars to the new, open gashes. _They're old_ , he tells himself, becalmed that he knows _something_ after all, as if he knew these scars.

There's a shocking hole in the middle of Draco Malfoy's chest, ribs torn out, and his beating heart is gimpsable behind the flap of his left lung that looks to have been stuffed aside impatiently. This is how you kill a dragon, Keynsten must have known. Take the heart of it. Keynsten must have a taste for symbolism. He probably collects questionable works of art. That's his message here: He wants it known that Draco Malfoy won't be lively after him, that he took the last bite of him, and he let him breathe only to make the loss an even bitterer one. There, I crippled your entertainer to pieces. Mend his bones and sew his cuts, I broke his spirit for good. Have fun putting him back on stage. _Have fun tonight._

Only that Laurent is a hunter is an artist is a Beast Keeper for a reason, and apparently he would make a bunch of dead twigs roar in dance on his stage if he so intended.

At least it is a comfort, like a secret home only known to the kind, that the beating of the heart is steady. That is good, because Harry went into this heart, nine years ago when Draco Malfoy went wherever he went. Harry went into the heart … ?

He doesn't even make sense anymore. He's got to get out of here.

“Clean that up”, says Aebischer with a dismissive nod in Laurent's direction. Harry hears the man speak through himself like someone else. Aebischer doesn't like the dragon being marked by another like that, he wouldn't enjoy playing with a secondhand toy. No, he's not that type. Harry could get away with it.

He needs to get out of here.

“What?!” Laurent is offended. The wing flops without grace to the ground, he let it go, so upset is he that his creative idea is not appreciated.

“That's got Keynsten's name all over it”, Aebischer clarifies, “I want him strong and fresh and healthy, tomorrow, same time, and no one sees him before I do.”

He doesn't know if that is possible. If it's even possible to fix an act of violence like that in one night and one day. Or ever, really.

Harry must have run for it because he's outside in the streets. Knockturn Alley is hostile now, openly so. It makes the rainy London air almost an acid fog to the lungs, and the cobblestone ground is leading Harry astray with its devious shimmer. He thinks he must be heading to the side street that he arrived in, but he can't be sure, not with the iron groan of blackout breathing hard into his senses.

"Ron!", shouts Aebischer, and his voice is cracking. Startled by the convict being so close, Harry flinches and hectically turns – no, wait, that was himself. But Harry spins, he won't stop spinning, and pale, hateful corpse lights flash in circles round his head, stealthy gleams from all the blurring eyes and mouths of Knockturn Alley ...

“RON!”

Harry goes down; the unfamiliar limbs supporting him, too tall, too high for him to stand on any longer, they're like columns tumbling in. Someone's catching him around the waist, and then he's pulled into the air, thrown in dizzying swirls around himself until a tight hook behind his navel direkts his flailing and he lands on his knees with an outcry pressed from his lungs. His hands grab Ron's jacket for dear life. They're in a clean, lit office hallway, auror's all around them, startled into serious concern by their sudden return.

“Mate! Harry - Harry calm down”, chants Ron as he tries and steadies his friend. Harry realizes that his breathing comes out in hoarse shouts. He stops himself and coughs, spasms pulling at his vocal cords. Everything's spinning still, it came along, it followed, it won't stop -

“RON”, Harry shrieks once more, this time through an outburst of tears. He looks his friend dead in the eye, imploring him: “You've got to, please, you – Ron, he'll make him FLY!”

_And I thought he just pissed off and planted his lazy arse on the patio of another country's manor his father's money bought him. I thought I had the right to be disappointed._

“Die?! What – mate! Who's dying? HARRY?!”

_I could have found him had I only cared to look._

Hereafter, Harry's last memory of tonight will be the sound of Aebischer sobbing from a chest full like an ocean bed. But can that petty illusion be cathartic, was it Harry after all who wept from the devil's throat? He faints, knocked out by the acknowledgement that nothing, _nothing_ can ever be done to atone for what havoc they've wreaked together. He would think of Voldemort – Tom - did he possess the capacity to, of Keynsten maybe. All those men who succeeded in too many monstrous deeds because of Harry's failures. But in the end, their many names don't matter.

The name that always made the difference has only ever been Harry's own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	6. Nine years and now

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Potter.”

It was incredible how heavy one's bones could get with fatigue once everything was meant to be alright. Harry knew, that day nine years ago when sunlight was already gently fading above the noble ruins of Hogwarts, that the worst was done. The fighting was done. The hopes and fears. The dying, too. There lay Tom Riddle's body on the floor, and there again too many of Harry's good friends. Harry was ready for the calm of grief this whole ordeal called life had earned him, and he awaited it in a moment of solitude no one dared to interrupt. He was their hero after all. He had the right to be alone, to sit outside on the stairs, the castle's mouth sighing weary songs of loss and victory into his hair. He had the right to just gaze into the smoke that curled up from the grounds which were the closest place to a home he'd ever known.

“Potter?”

He'd ignored Malfoy's grovelling voice on purpose. Behind his back, the other's shiny, custom-made shoes were restlessly treating to and fro; he was a beast of prey on the run.

“Potter, can I just - ?”

Malfoy decided to be intrusive enough and sat down next to Harry. He kept a (silly) respectful distance of one arm's length between them. But he sat. Of course he did. No one dared to interrupt Harry's solitude, he was their hero after all. But he's never been Malfoy's.

“I, just, wanted to say - … uh, _shite_.”

Watching the other fidgeting from the corner of his eye, Harry could have beed gloating. Malfoy tore his stupid hair and his feet were always in motion. His cursing didn't give him any dignity back. It was really selfish of him to think his wish to talk would be of any priority to Harry right now. Really, such an insensitive sod was he, always putting his own head first. Apparently some things were not yet broken by the war.

It made Harry smile. Absurdly, it made Harry glad.

Malfoy struggled for words. He made an effort, really, and Harry wondered if he might've just wanted to actually mean what he was working out to say.

He said: “Look, before they sack me, I just, ... I want … ”

There Harry threw him a half-hearted frown. “Your trial?”

“No!” Malfoy's hands shot up in defense. His face grew red with shame and urgency. He glanced Harry straight in the eyes but bolted off of them just as suddenly. The visual contact seemed enough to sting him. “I'm not here to beg you – I want to”, he interrupted himself with a dirty word again, and suddenly, to Harry's dismay, there were tears running down his cheeks, his face scrunching up and blushing deeper still. That he allowed himself to cry in front of Harry after all these years of spite seemed to unsettle the mere atmosphere between them.

Apparently some things were yet breaking after the war, and Harry's heart sank.

“I'm sorry”, sobbed Malfoy and bit his fist.

Now Harry did give him a hard look.

“Good”, he snapped, “because you should be.” It was all nostalgia, fun and games, a git staying true to his git personality after all everyone had went through, but you couldn't just walk around thinking to undo what you'd messed up with a few forced crocodile tears and a toytown plea.

Malfoy fliched and coughed to cover up another stuffy sounding bubble of sobs. He shook his head, unwilling to meet Harry's disapproving glare.

“Not _that_ , I mean”, his eyes roamed the ruins unfolded before him, and a shudder ran through his crouching body at the sight of the destruction he had actively supported, “ ... not _that_. That too, but I'll pay for that. I'm sorry for … for ...“

He trailed off one more time and swallowed. When Harry realized he had been staring, Malfoy's face had turned pale again. Only his ears were still red, and the tip of his nose. It was getting rather cold, really, and Malfoy's stupid silver hair had a stupid tinge of gold in the sundown. The teardrop clinging to his chin was trembling and ablaze with light. Harry lost his grit to glare and faced downwards, studying the debris under his dusty trainers instead. He glanced Malfoy's shoes as well, and he'd been wrong about their look: There was nothing shiny about them anymore.

This was that oddest moment, nine years ago, when Malfoy apologized for all his ugly jokes about Harry's parents being dead. His mum especially. This was that awkward moment when Harry found the other's regrets were forgivable wrongs, he deemed them regretted so earnestly. Malfoy did not apologize for what another made him do in war but for what bullshit he'd come up with long before that, all by his stupid self. He apologized to _Harry_.

He also thanked him. Harry had saved his mum, that's how he put it. He wouldn't have known how to go on without her. He'd never known how Harry did.

“I didn't do anything”, Harry shrugged and felt embarrassed suddenly, “she was just with me.” By this he meant both his own mother, all through his life, and Malfoy's in the forest. He meant to say there was nothing at all to thank him for. “It's okay.”

“Okay”, echoed Malfoy on a breath. Then he stood, bashfully, and turned to retreat to the Great Hall where his parents waited for the aurors to pick them up. Narcissa was going to be fine. Lucius not so much. And surely Malfoy thought to follow in the footsteps of his father as he'd been expected to do for his entire young life.

Turning around on a whim, Harry called after the other boy before he could disappear: “Wait - your trial! I'll witness for you!”

He'd been planning to anyway, so why make a surprise of it when telling it now would spare another a big chunk of stress?

Malfoy was abruptly and obviously wary of how to carry himself to that information; he glanced over his shoulder in a fashion which amused Harry just a tad. Harry offered him a smile which was answered with the weirdest paranoid grimace - it only tickled Harry more.

“Witness for what ecaxtly, Potter?”

“That you knew it was me, stupid.”

No rebuff, no admission. They didn't need either one really at this point.

“You don't have to”, offered Malfoy after a moment's hesitation, and he meant that. His eyes meant that. He hadn't come for Harry to obtain his sympathy by fraud. It had felt important that the other knew his thoughts … before, maybe, they'd never meet again. And that was all there was to it.

“I know,” said Harry, “see you then, okay?”

“… okay.”

 

 

 

And that was nine long years ago, and Harry went to speak at Malfoy's trial to which Malfoy himself never showed up. He probably rather planted his coward arse on the patio of another country's manor his father's money had bought him.

 

 

 

“Okay”, Harry rasps, and it doesn't really bother him that it's his own voice which is sore, not that of another man. He's lying down, he realizes as he slowly, slowly wakes. He's in a bed. Not his own, though. His bed in Grimmauld Place is cozy and always dusty on top of the covers, no matter how often he washes them. Grimmauld Place is really, really dusty altogether, and Harry's dust has that homely dusty smell he'd recognize everywhere. Here, the smell surrounding him is distinctly sterile, and the mattress under his butt is more of a wooden board than anything.

He had the pleasure before: This place is the Ministry's stationary hospital.

“Harry? Are you - ?”

“Okay...”

“Are you awake?”

Hermione's whisper sounds incredibly concerned, which means reproachful. She gets reproachful everytime someone dear to her gives her reasons to be concerned. Harry thinks she adopted that from Molly maybe, or rather no, they're just agreed on that sentence. Of course Harry never meant to upset anyone, whatever even brought him down to the infirmary again. Mione's hand touches his forehead, and dear, even her _hand_ is concerned; strained flat and hard like this it's more of a wooden board than anything. A goddamned hospital bed, curing you by sending you fleeing. With a grin at his own mindless joke, Harry lazily sighs, the sound of it pulled up from the lowest depth of him. He wills his heavy eyelids to open. Goodness, is he fuzzy. It's like the air that crawls on contact with his body was plushed up with a layer of feathery statics, just lying in wait to zap him.

“Hey, Mione.”

She's a blur in the dim lit room until she shoves his glasses onto his nose. The glasses he needn't wear was the Polyjuice still working.

He knows it then. Knows it again, everything - zap – and his pulse is in his ears.

The Polyjuice faded, so there's got to be at least one hour lost since - he didn't even bear his witness to the pensieve since - ! Sweat breaks out on his forehead, in the nape of his neck, and his face must be contorting in horror if he was to judge his own appearance by the look Hermione mirrors him.

“Syncope”, she all of a sudden recites his medi-charts mechanically. Harry suffered a spontaneous syncope. That's not really accurate, however, she finds that important to point out, because a syncope is usually caused by physical means, not emotional breakdowns. Harry suffered a freak-pseud-syncope, then. Impatiently, he cuts her short.

“What time is it?”

Tempus says three in the morning, and Hermione's frown at Harry is disapproving as she reads the glowing numbers in the air out loud to him. Every movement, every word of her appears a little bit too slow all of a sudden. Buffered, if that's a comparison. Harry's brain has not yet wholly reclaimed vigilance it seems, or he's thinking too fast for matter to keep up. _Three in the morning._ He does his math, stumbles and fails. But he knows it's been too long. Something inside of him just clicks and his shock melts into a frantic outburst of action. He's flailing to get up.

“Harry James Potter, I DARE you, no! You stay – you could - wait - ! - HARRY!”

It's futile, her attempt to wrestle him down. One moment he's so close to her face they nearly bump, the grim line of her mouth close up making a random memory for later. Her lips are white and chapped. She worried them. He smells his own breath and smells sick. In his throat, his heart does an upsetting, warmth spreading run, and his blood seems to be even pumping through his bones. A mean twist of her wrists does the trick and he jumps free to his feet. He lands on the linoleum floor with his trainers on, which only reassures him to revent back to business without further ado. No one seems to have bothered to change him for the health check, and that's good. He'd feel lost in a patient's gown now.

“Where's Ron?”, he throws over his shoulder as he strides for the door already; it stands ahead of him, a dark, looming rectangle, framed by the corridor's bright light seeping in through the cracks around it.

“He's just come back. Harry, you've got to sit down, just a moment. Give yourself the chance to adjust, would you?”

Her hands grabs his elbow, his hand grabs the door knob. He turns around, his face in a frown.

“Back from where?”

“Oldland's. Harry, there's something we need to talk about.”

Sometimes, reality is cut clear. So clear that it's a stream, unresponsive to hindrances like the little emotions of a single man. A stream remains indifferent to what it washes away. Time and moments run through defenseless perception, desperate, confused and fearful perception, as if they went through a filter and carried no grains to stick between the gills of Harry's mind, no grains to pick up on and connect with, because reality is clear cut and unimpressed by his need to believe that it cannot be true, that it can't _be_ , but it won't be any different than it plays out on him.

There was nothing, Hermione informs him with a huff from her chapped lips and a knot in her brows. Ron and a team of nine turned Oldland's Oddities upside down, they even had a curse breaker with them. Right after Harry fainted on them they went out, Robards giving his permission willingly, because even though they had no way to obtain the memory material gathered by Harry, there must've been something after all if it had him freak out like that.

Just, there was nothing to be found. Hermione wouldn't lie to Harry.

He rubs his cheeks to calm himself and roughs up his palms with the stubble that he knows he shaved today. It's been too long already, _too long_ , too much precious time _lost_ in which they did nothing but _find nothing_ while Laurent did, - ! - who knows what. To Draco Fucking Malfoy, Merlin _damn_ it. Harry breathes deep, feels his heart rate go up and down with the oxygen chasing through his bloodstream. Behind his eyelids he sees Malfoy's heart.

“There was a door”, he insists. Hermione examines him warily.

“Yes”, she admits, “leading to the basement.”

“In the cupboard was...”

“Yes, Harry. Ron opened every cupboard he could find. There was nothing. Harry... what happened down there?”

 _Breathe_.

Harry allows himself to breathe.

“He moved him”, is his conclusion then, tears of inconsolable hatred burning his eyes. Laurent knew there was something foul after all. Harry fucked it up and Laurent moved the dragon somewhere else. Malfoy. Dragon. It's easier to call him that, to call him dragon. _Malfoy_. Harry can't even really _think_ it.

The next hour is a blur. It has Harry see Ron vomiting on Robards' floor after resurfacing from the pensieve. It also has him argue with Ron: He downright explodes on his friend at the mere remark that the identity of the victim can't possibly be distinguished by what Harry saw; that the face was a mess at best, and that there are too many Death Eaters still out there to be sure. It could be anyone, Ron says, and Harry grabs his collar and pushes him against a wall, spitting, “I _know_ it's him”, in Ron's face.

_I've seen his heart._

“I KNOW it's him!”

As if that was any indication to go by, and as if that was something Harry of all people would know. But he saw Draco Malfoy's _heart_. He's well aware he's being ridiculous, and Robards pronounces a serious doubt at the credibility of Harry's memory altogether; there have been illusions remembered before, and remembered illusions poured to the pensieve. The physical damage shown in the vision would not allow the victim to be awake. The blood loss would not allow the victim to be alive.

“As far as we know, the person you've seen might not even exist.”

Something Harry can't comprehend leaves his mouth as a shot, and it must be a foul insult, but before Robards' face can fall, Harry's shoulder rams the office door ajar already and he's striding out – because this dreadful hour has him grab a fistful of Aebischer's stupid Malfoy-looking hair and bang his face on the table. The final crunching noise of the man's nasal bridge is a momentary satisfaction, but this gleeful hour has Harry dizzy with loathing and despair at the wheezing sound of laughter dribbling from the man's split lips: He can't deliver anything helpful at all, the curse of the beast keeper still muzzling him.

Harry bangs his head once more for good measure.

Then, the hours after that disastrous first hour have Harry brutally put aside in the Ministry's stationary hospital again, his eyes exhausting themselves to burns on the door in front of him. He spends amounts of time he will not count with Tempus in a stony silence which he grits around the avalanche of thoughts bearing down on one another in their relentless plunge through his head. Ron and his team are doing their research behind this door, research on Merlin knows what, Harry excluded for his temper and mental state. Hermione sits beside him on the hospital bed, and she soon gave up making conversation. She's cross with him because he refuses to lie down, not to mention drink the sleeping draught which was suggested he take in order to get rest. She's actually mad because Harry didn't go nuts enough for the medi-witch to sedate him by force.

Through her teeth she all of a sudden tells him to get a grip of himself, but she doesn't move or stop staring at the door with him. She doesn't want an honest answer, obviously, as she demands to know what difference if would even make if any of this was real and if it _was_ Malfoy of all people whom he found in Oldland's basement.

“ _How_ on earth do you plan to make this mess _your_ fault again? It's _not_ , okay? And Peggy Fawn was _not_ your fault. It's like you want it to be, but it's not. Harry, this isn't funny anymore. This isn't healthy.”

He's got to get a grip finally, that's what she tells him after years of enduring, patience and sympathy for his holing up in his dusty little world of regret, but obviously she doesn't know how Harry knows guilt and broken promises work. Hermione Granger is so _stupid_ sometimes for always being so smart, and Harry shakes his head with a joyless smile straining his mouth, the triumph of being right too ugly on his mind.

When he blinks his eyes he sees the godforsaken heart again; another thing that surely must be haunting him until the day the died.

Outside in the corridor voices rage and steps of aurors rush in and out of offices, calling out orders Harry doesn't understand. It's a spiky chaos to him. All seems distant now, hateful and lost.

But slowly meanwhilst, sun is dawning, and as it seeps through the curtains into the infirmary the light adopts almost the same shade of crimson gold it radiated on Harry and sodding Malfoy, nine years ago, sitting on the steps in front of the castle of Hogwarts. Harry remembers he studied his feet thoroughly that day, his trainers and the dirt under his soles.

He remembers he made Aebischer's foot rub a crumb of chalk to dust in the arena.

“Hermione.”

She looks at him. She's tired now from being angry. “Yes?”

“Laurent didn't move the place, he moved the door.”

“That is … possible.” If there was a place to begin with.

“Can we locate where the soil under my shoes comes from?”

"Yes, there's that tracking cha- ah."

The understanding dawning on her face is brighter than the swelling sunrise billowing behind the curtains. Harry's smile is grim, not daring yet to hope too much.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one took me a while, Ive got a load of shifts right now. Didn't plan on stretching this part of the story out into so much detail, but here we are - next time is rescue time, promise!
> 
> Have a look at my **[TUMBLR](https://selfdestructian.tumblr.com)** always, and bless me with your feedback please if you so will ~


	7. Fly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this is the point where I, lovingly, remind us all of the fact that a seventeen year old baby Tom Felton does not (as the movies suggest) look like **this** handsome lad clad in black but rather like **that** little smug pup. Keep in mind, keep in mind, keep in mind.  
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They are on brooms, racing up the sheer majestic side of a mountain pass in northern Ireland that stoops into rich fields and woods still green in the last throes of summer.

Locating the site took them no more but a few moments back in the Ministry, but unending moments as far as Harry was concerned. When they apparated, a rescue squad of sixteen able people, Hermione stayed behind to maintain the trace she invoked for them to follow. But they didn't depart without Harry, no, he would _not_ be shaken off, not after the idea that promised to save the day after all was his and no one elses.

They couldn't take the risk of barging directly into Laurent's cave, though. Dark magic warding it was to be expected, and only a fool would try and penetrate a net as of razors, hoping to get through in one piece on the other side. They popped out of apparition at the foot of a hill then, steadily rising into rocky and snow topped slopes. That's for where they mounted their brooms and took off into the crisp air; somewhere in the heights is the faint silver band ending which protrudes from their apparition point and through it connects to the source of the trace, Hermione, who keeps it intact.

The band sparkles in the light of the young day, humbling even the spectacular landscape under its daring, graceful loops. The aurors fly higher than it still to find where it eventually delves into the ground.

Harry's teeth would chatter did he not bite down so hard. Determination and speed are one and always wanting as he flies, the wind pulling at him and leaving an invisible blueprint of his route in the wake of his broom. The cold and the sun collide on his skin up this high, not agreeing all too well with each other – he's freezing and blinded, and the air howls in his ears of autumn and winter to come. It tastes like them, too, while the world is full in leaf and juice under his feet, just a completely different world it seems to be; yes, the sun is bright today. And the wind is cold today. And somewhere underground there waits _another_ world, a third one to these two which already toil off each other ... a nightmare come true lurks in the dark to be upended because Harry was _right_. He wasn't tricked. Why bring him all the way into the irish mountains just to feed him an illusion? Harry was right and it feels so surreal.

“RON”, he shouts at the top of his voice before he dives: Under him, the silver trace is bending over, stuck into the face of a cliff. The sixteen of them circle it in formation, methodically looking for an opening on the surface which would mark the ceiling of the cave, the hole in it through which Harry saw the light fall in. Between a set of boulders, topped with frozen hats of snow, there is a gap which is black, unnaturally black, and which swallows the occasional snowflakes as if they stopped existing in its abyss.

“Over there!”, points one of the nine ward experts. Harry lands wildly, and once the snow crunches under his feet he's already left waiting again. Wards of the darker kind want to be thoroughly taken apart in order to make them fall neutral and permit a stranger entry. Nine ward- and three curse-breakers go instantly to work. Idle are only Harry, Ron and two other auror colleagues of Ron whom Harry never got to know until now. They tell him their names. He knows he will forget them.

“Hey”, Ron's breath forms fog before his face. He puts his hand on Harry's shoulder and squeezes him as if to cheer him up, or as if to apologize because he didn't trust his best friend right away in this mess. They stand a bit off, closer to the cliff, because Harry needed to focus on the enormous horizon just a moment instead of the work being done on the hole. From the hole there are bestial, ghostly snarls and frizzling bolts emerging in the color of pale dead flesh, for quite a while already, but there on the horizon, there a calm towers of clouds bathing in kingly magenta. He needed a distraction or else frustration would have gotten the better of him for how fiercely Laurent's wards are fighting their attempts.

“They're through another”, Ron informs him. Harry nods. His nostrils are numb. The air is so cold. Harry fiercely shakes off the wondering of how incredibly cold Malfoy must be down in his cave ...

“Mate. We'll get this straight, alright? And Aebischer goes behind bars. You'll close this chapter.”

“ … yeah.”

There's a crash, a hateful groan; the final ward is broken. Harry is by the hole as fast as his legs will allow, but he promised to stay behind while the others go in. He promised because Ron doesn't need him fainting yet again while Merlin knows what hell would break loose on them once Laurent noticed their arrival. Harry promised himself to wait one minute, no longer, until he broke his promise and followed the others, because surely if things went well they wouldn't need longer than a minute, and if things went bad Harry couldn't be expected to just stand by.

Tempus is ticking away before his unblinking eyes once the last bundle of branches in the last broom's rear disappeared through the swallowing dark gap in the ground. Gripping his own broom tight, Harry glances down and up at the time again, down again, but it's incredible how dense the blackness wallows in the cave. He only faintly sees the glowing wands throwing Lumos ahead of each auror, but no trace of the bright circle of light on the floor is to be seen. With the last ward broken, maybe the spell sucking the light in broke as well.

Five seconds gone and it's too silent. Harry's fist clasps and loosens around his broomstick, the leather of his flying glove graunching from his nervousness.

Six.

Seven.

Eight seconds and he hears a shout – nine – and more men shouting – ten – and a sound like some big cloth flapping against hard air or – _fucking shit._

Wings.

Just as Harry throws himself into the abyss, broom pressed tightly between his thighs, there are more shouts and now flaring spells shooting wildly to and fro. Someone casts Lumos Maxima, but its pale whereas broad glow doesn't reveal more than the aurors themselves. Laurent must have prepared an ambush, must have noticed the wards breaking. There is one thing, though, and it freezes Harry's blood: The hook in the ground is bare of its chain.

_Where is he?_

Harry dives with the speed of a falling stone, the cold rush of air biting him, when all of a sudden a blazing pillar of flame is thrown vertically into the vast room right towards where he was headed, startling Harry into a sharp sideway plummet. The heat still licks his face as the flame itself has already been gulped by the dark again. Harry points his wand where he assumes its source; just beyond the vague edge of the aurors' light, somewhere near the ground.

“EXPECTO PATRONUM!”

He doesn't know why he chose to cast this instead of another Lumos Maxima, broadening the range of the first. Bad call, bad instinct probably, as Harry's instincts in wild battle have long since stopped working in his favor. Curse his weakness, curse the impulse telling his jerking heart that maybe light wouldn't be enough, but just a moment Harry needed comfort, too.

His illuminating stag throws its moon dew shine upon a figure, however, and as they look up Harry at once recognizes the big forehead and the round, wide, fearful eyes. Malfoy crouches in a shallow crevice, naked and grey, a ridiculous amount of uncempt hair sitting on his head, and all his bruises and wounds are gone, just gone, as if they never blemished him. Harry catches on his breath from the violent surge of too many emotions at the same time claiming his body - because Malfoy's alive, he's right down there. Not to mention he's _existing_.

Harry was right after all.

Alas, as miraculously as Malfoy's healing came to be, his arms are pitiful: They're functional, strong-looking and disgusting bat-like flaps. Laurent went with his design and made it work.

And he made up some more.

Harry's patronus doesn't comfort Malfoy at all, it scares him so much that he scurries out of his crevice and flails backwards along the wall of a great black boulder, wildly flapping his make-shift wings to take off. Just, he can't. For all the noise they make, his webbed fingers are proportionately too small to take him into the air. He makes himself stumble is all, but once the stag sets hoove on the ground and takes on a gallop towards him, Malfoy lets out a bestial snarl and spits fire.

He spits fire.

Draco Sodding Malfoy actually spat fire at Harry just now.

Hysterical for a moment, Harry lets out a shrill laugh on his broom. But he stops himself as brusquely as Malfoy stops his flame – because Malfoy stops with a bloodcurdling outcry which injects itself directly into Harry's bones. Only now he realizes that, even without the chain dangling from it, the ring is still fit firmly through Malfoy's jaw. It's metal. The fire heated it up. Malfoy awkwardly touches his wrists to his face as his fingers are too long to use, whining at the top of his voice, and Harry thinks his mind might tear when the perversion of it all slaps him in the face again. As his patronus dies out from Harry's sudden dismay it gets momentarily pitch black again around Malfoy, and he could be going anywhere, could be taken, could be hit by a ricochetting spell - losing sight of him sets Harry into sheer panic, because being so close to success he can _taste_ things to go wrong, and has he ever been any good at helping people unless he died for them?

His sacrifice won't buy him anything in here.

Harry blasts Lumos in his hurry and darts down to where he remembers the other being, his arm outstretched so that the orb of light at the tip of his wand would reach and outline the ground quickly – again he remembers too late to just cast Maxima instead.

Meanwhile, the shouting of the aurors got more aggressive behind Harry's back. They appear to be helpless to find the direction from which the attacks are coming; it's changing. There must be Laurent, wildly apparating around them, keeping to the dark.

One of the men misjudged Malfoy's fire. He also misjudges Harry's onrush for a counter attack, so he wants to help a comrade out. Sizzling and glowing fluorescent, a hard spell bounces off the black boulder Malfoy sits pressed against, missing his face just about inches. He shrieks with terror, and the sparks flung into his eyes have him abruptly bolt into a wild run for the shadows, deep into the giant mountain cave: Just as Harry's light had caught him he ran off again.

“SHIT!”

For once Harry thinks clear and finally casts Maxima after the fleeing figure of Malfoy, just he outruns it as soon as it hits him, his limbs a pale, flitting bundle of frenzy jackknifing greedily for the formless black. Harry races after him insofar as he wrests his broom up to better survey the bowels of the cave which he bares casting another shock of light; he nearly hits his head on a stalagtite doing so but dodges, eyes keen on the newly revealed ground: Awe inspiring flats scattered with sharp edged pieces of rock show beneath his position in the air, their routes zigzagging into a richly toothed labyrinth of clefts and cliffs, but again Malfoy's too quick, escaping Harry's gaze as he slips into some secret passageway between a set of boulders Harry can't possibly see through. Then there, coming out at some completely other end, Malfoy scampers into the shades again.

How is the prat with his unwieldy wings so ridiculously fast anyway? Harry grunts, his great concern whipping up a wave of anger, and with his teeth gritted and a swell of adrenaline throbbing through his veins he shoots into pursue. Somewhere he means to hear a baffled Ron calling after him, but Harry already dove into the dark, only the little orb of Lumos lighting his way: If he intents to catch Malfoy any time soon the light must be moving along, and Harry _must_ catch him now. Stupid prat might very well snap his own neck if he kept his headlong tempo, blind in a hostile territory he cannot be familiar with – he surely never had the chance to go berserk in this place without his chain on before.

For a moment Harry is convinced he overshot his runaway about a mile, because on the spur of the moment he finds himself in echoing stillness and complete black far off the aurors' warring place. He circles intently for a moment, drawing wide rounds without being able to penetrate the ground with his eyes. Then he hears it; whistling breaths and bare feet padding on the stone floor. Someone's being in a tearing hurry down there.

_Got you._

“Expecto Patronum... ” Careful this time, Harry merely breathes for his stag to come forth again. His senses are wound tight and his wand-hand trembles a bit while he lets the blinding creature out, hoping that a gentler descend of it would not again have Malfoy headlong opt to flight. Harry doubts the other would be in a state to differ friend from foe right now, but it's just a proper moment of clear sight Harry needs of him to aim a quick Petrificus Totalus and render him immobilized - unless he really brought harm upon himself, and wouldn't that be _sweet_ , the stupid sod dying right under Harry's nose just when he's out to save his arse.

No, Harry's not having it and ignores the ill-boding drop of his guts.

His stag glides down in a sweep leading to the right, its antlers held high and kingly in pose, maybe, hopefully commanding at least some momentary awe delaying whom it means to find.

Alas, Malfoy yelps before he can be spotted – Harry hears him sprint sideways, hard away from the patronus which in turn runs harder down on Malfoy – Harry throws his flight into line, wand drawn, and a heartbeat long he gets a glimpse of a grey back, naked in the night of the mountain. He nearly casts.

Nearly.

With a pang of fright, Harry shouts, “NO!”, but Malfoy's flapping wings could not catch his fall from the sudden slope neither him nor Harry had imagined yawning from the deep.

“SHIT, nonono, NO!” Like lightning strikes, Harry lies flat in flight and hurls himself after the falling body. He hears him. Screaming, breathless, thudding firmly against many juts protruding from the slope.

Harry doesn't see him.

“LUMOS MA-!”

There's a final crash and a painful gasp, and just as Harry thought he couldn't be blinder his eyes brim with tears and drown the sparse beginning of light at the tip of his wand to a useless blur. But his patronus leaps after him then; it leaps right though Harry's body.

The wash of it must be his desperate, stubborn, final refusal to let go of hope just yet. _Not yet_ , he tells himself in the blink of an eye, because wouldn't this be so goddamned sweet, stupid Malfoy jumping to his death just when Harry is about to save his life?

_You fucking wish, you git, you prat, you stupid - !_

The same moment Harry flies surrounded by his stag, a greater rocky ledge grows illuminated as if looked upon by a merciful, godly eye beneath Harry who's still storming in, mere seconds away from driving his broom into the floor. Wings splayed out from a chest rising and falling like windswept branches swell in storms, there lies Malfoy on his back; Harry looks him in the eyes and they're alive.

Very alive.

Malfoy snarls, fearful but menacing. Behind his teeth glows a red, glaring flame.

“PETRIFICUS TOTALUS!”

Harry hits the floor, hits his head as he crashes forward off his broom while it splinters in the middle from how straight it struck the ground. The air is sluiced out of him by a thick, overwhelming sensation of pain crumpling up his lungs. For a moment his ears are underwater he thinks. Blurry, though still through two intact lenses, Harry witnesses his faithful stag gliding down beside him, its pearlish hooves trotting with no sound in a circle around the scene of accident. When it sits down it cradles its moonlight body as though a halo around Malfoy's head. Groaning, Harry feels hearing and focus coming back to him before he even comprehends what happened, and as he glances vaguely about, that what stands out to him first is how from Malfoy's mouth and nostrils little curls of smoke girdle up to the obscured height of the cliff that had them all plummet about seventy feet downhill.

Harry's brain throbs as he heaves himself onto his back, catching his breath with big yelps. He'll have a giant ass lump from this and maybe a concussion, and _boy_ will Mione be scolding him. Meanwhile his patronus sits lazily flitting its ears and nibbling the fur on its back. Malfoy lies frozen in his pose that ridicules the crucified messiah; sculpture inert he looks to be made of wax. Shadows fall like holes into him where his body is too thin. Not even considering his wings, he looks not _real_. It sends chills down Harry's spine. But then again there's that flimsy coat of blond beard fuzz smouldering upon the git's lip.

_Caught fire, hu?_

Harry wants to laugh and yet his stomach clenches as though beholding something very, very rare. Just, the stupid smoke. That's irrationally reminding him of his latest attempt at revoking his childhood cooking skills last Sunday. Kreacher was not amused.

“Oh my fucking GOD”, he finally pants and hammers his nerveless fists on the ground, “you were fucking trying to roast me, you bastard!”

Of course, petrified as he is, Malfoy will not in any way reply. He just smokes on while Harry resumes to catch his breath some more.

“You ungrateful arsehole!”

Then, having caught enough wind for that, Harry bursts into guffaws. And then he can only so stop himself from crying. Suddenly it seems impossible to not avert his eyes. For a few awkward heartbeats, he stares blankly up into the inky darkness that swallows the whole world above him.

But Malfoy did fall quite a bit, and Harry should immediately have seen to his health.

He gets up and dusts off his shaky knees, just to kneel down beside Malfoy and dust them up all over again. He sits clumsily in the space between the other's torso and upper arm which lies thrown out from his body in a square angle. Harry doesn't want to stare at the beginnings of the incredible anatomy there, but ... he doesn't know where else to look, a consuming shame sneaking through his blood.

He swallows. His tongue is dry. He coughs as it gets stuck in the back of his throat.

Before he knows what he's doing, Harry peels off his gloves and is gingerly feeling up Malfoy's shoulder. _Incredible._ With bated breath he gives the dislocated looking part a press and feels healthy strands of long muscles gently slipping over knobs of bones which would never feel like this in a healthy human body. But Laurent _made_ this healthy. This would work. Harry worked with magical birds, with winged creatures of all kinds. If Malfoy's body was smaller, this absolute monstrosity done to him, or dare Harry say _marvel_ , it would actually carry him through the sky.

The whole construction is conflicting Harry so much he gets a little light-headed. He counts a group of tiny birthmarks with his pinkie, _three and two_ , and when he's done he starts again. This skin is altogether pleasant to the touch, yes, Harry thinks it's like stroking something that just hatched, bald and soft and maybe just a little sticky from the sweat of birth ...

He should leave that be.

As his fingertips slip on their retreat, suddenly the fine, damp hairs of Malfoy's armpit tickle him. Harry jumps with a fright.

“Okay ….”, he breathes and stupidly wrings his hand, “okay, we'll fix that. Surely we can fix that. Well, I can't but I bet you Mione can if not the awesome folk of Mungo's.”

What Harry can do is heal all visible bumps and scratches Malfoy caught from the fall, and with a jolt he goes at it. He can also put a heat-up charm on the other, and a cushioning one underneath him. A cursory medical check tells that a few bones of the long fingers and a single rib are broken, but Harry sets them easily enough. Malfoy is the dragon all over again in Harry's mind when he attends to the more prominent parts of his wings, and as he taps Malfoy's chest with Episkey, he doesn't look at the scars lining it. _They're old_ , he remembers thinking, but that's silly of him to think. They don't look so old and for all he knows they could be anything, so Harry trains himself as numb to their sight as they would be to touch. He doesn't need to return to that loo in Hogwarts now, to another world, another life it seems.

Having found a dearly needed calm in the practised first aid, because he gives it to confiszated animals often enough, Harry handles Malfoy well for a moment. The shushing words he tells do at least soothe himself, and while he hopes to convey to his patient that he doesn't mean harm he smoothes every spot that he healed for good measure with a gentle few strokes of his palm. Harry makes sure no greater damage escapes his attention that could tear later on once they got to transportation, and after checking the area twice he's mindful to release the other's airways and ribcage from the petrification. That's important in magical animal care as well; never petrify a beast's chest too long, they might get too distressed from the rigidity and suffocate.

Harry can't read Malfoy's distress, or rather he tries to ignore it, but it shouts from every vein straining against his immobility, from the little hooting sounds his nose produces to his freed, wild breaths making his chest blow up and collapse again. The fuss makes Harry feel guilty for being kind, but he tries hard to ignore it.

Finally done with the worst, he worked up not half the unspeakable amount of courage he'd need to turn to Malfoy's face. Because not tangled in the rush of pursuit, really looking at each other ... what will that be like?

_Do you even recognize me?_

Harry's head gives an overwhelming, painful throb that has him gasp and grab for where he hit himself. That he flushes nearly dizzy when he glances Malfoy's private parts and only realizes what he sees when the glance already turned into a mindless stare doesn't help his case. But the metal ring has to come off. There's no way Harry can let it stay. It's preventing him from easing the burns around Malfoy's mouth, and he imagines them to be particularly nasty.

“Alright, alright”, Harry says, carefully lifting Malfoy's chin to have a better look at how the shackle is attached – Malfoy blows a shivering gush of breath through his nostrils, “sorry, but – this needs to go, this is terrible, it goes off, okay? Just a minute and it's off.”

Fortunately, not the whole girth of the object is penetrating the jaw. Harry sees there is a thinner rod struck through, surely connecting the outer to the inner end of the ring. The whole area is sore, however, as the plump bigger part of the installment must have been constantly rubbing the skin.

Not to mention Laurent yanking the chain. Harry's stomach flips.

Evanesco has the rod vanish, Engorgio the now open ring grow large enough for Harry to take it out without causing any further rashes. With a clank he throws it aside, gulping and wondering where to fixate his gaze on now that it's gone.

 _His mouth._ It's not the eyes that are burnt after all. Malfoy's mouth will do.

The moment Harry gently points his wand again is a solemn one somehow. Somehow innocent enough. Malfoy's fortunately just pink from the flames that he spat, not blistered yet. But who's to say his tongue and gums will be the same, Harry figures, so he coats him in a cooling charm. It lies like thick, fresh water on everything sore, gently seeping in through a gap between the puffy lips that Harry opened by softly squeezing down the cheeks. From that gloppy, weirdly kissy pout that resembles Rosie's for a beat, Malfoy lets out a long, long breath which tickles Harry's face; likely, it would have been a sigh of relief were Malfoy's vocal chords not safely tied down alongside whatever miracle fire gland Laurent put into his throat.

“Okay … ”, says Harry and allows himself a smile, transfixed by the gloss his patronus is shining on top of his liquid magic, “feels better, does it?”

Oh it's got to. Malfoy's chest lifts calmly, deeply now, and his breathing evens out. Harry chuckles as he twirls what appears to be a natural goatee that sat hidden under the ring. Makes pointy git just pointier is the joke in it.

He wants to comment on the discovery, just he doesn't get there.

Considering what kind of arts Laurent will have used on Malfoy's rapid cure (and rapid hair regrowth), Harry absently lets his thumb feel across the other's cheek; but there's no beard, he notes now, no stubble. Just a thin, patchy baby fuzz like that kind of first fuzz Harry used to have as a teenager. He frowns.

When finally he glances up and actually dares to look, Harry goes limp with shock – because since that day they last met, that day nine years ago ... Malfoy didn't age a single day. He's soft faced as in just loosing his puppy fat around the cheekbones, even though he's skinny starved – though, no. He's less starved than just young. There is that lanky youth about him, and it's disturbing Harry now that he recognizes it. A seventeen year old, scrawny, stupid boy is Malfoy, that stupid boy who sat next to Harry on the stairs outside of Hogwarts, apologizing for being stupid.

He didn't age a single goddamned day.

Harry doesn't know why that undoes him so, be it the idea that a kid like this should have been kept for torture, or be it the idea that Harry was no more than a kid like this when he was willing to die, that they all were actually _kids_ when they went through the war – be it as it will, but a sob racks his throat and all of a sudden he finds himself shaking with tears.

Maybe distressed by Harry's violent drop of mood, Malfoy cries, too. Although his eyes are void of expression and staring up to where they stared when he got petrified, his tears run free and soak the hair behind his ears.

“Sorry”, Harry gasps and tries to compose himself. He wipes his stuffy nose with a sleeve and Malfoy's tears with fingers that tremble too much, so he soon cards them through the other's damp hair, kneading it to curls to try and distract himself. Malfoy's ear is soft and glowing hot. Harry doesn't know why he thinks he could fold that ear up and it wouldn't protest, he doesn't know why he would fold an ear, but Harry begins to loose his mental focus right now and suddenly the light of his patronus is a spray of spikes against him – with a grunt, he shakes his head.

Skeered by that, Malfoy whistles, and a new wave of tears wells out of him. He doesn't make a sound but that whistle, and yet, through the tunnel of memory, Harry hears him cry how he cried on the bathroom floor in Hogwarts' caste. He hears Rosie cry because he frightened her. He hears Peggy cry, oh she cried and reached out for him, for help, for comfort, and did he fail her. Harry hears Teddy crying, too, because sometimes Harry just looses his focus and, in trying to remain with himself, he scares the people around him. That's why Gin gave him up in the end, because Harry never stopped scaring her, even though she was more scared for him than herself.

Ginny wanted kids. Harry wouldn't ever allow himself to have kids.

The new gush of tears stings his fingertips as fire licks. He jerks his hand out of Malfoy's hair.

“Sorry! I'm sorry!” To give them both distance, he recoils. A thud and he sits on his butt. Resulting from his fright, Malfoy's midriff tenses up – his breath comes shallow now but rapidly. He'll hyperventilate like that. Harry hates himself while his insides knot up and his brain is hammering, his skull and the spot where his head hit the ground. 

Harry's patronus, with a sorrow in its gaze, is threatening to dim on them again.

But as pleading often goes, and comforting, it happends without thought to it that Harry's palm finds Malfoy's chest. Just the right amount of pressure, one should guess, might give someone distressed security. That doesn't always works and sometimes ends in a disaster, but only the right amount of pressure and the warmth of Harry's palm help to shush the banging of Malfoy's heart that banged as though it tried to kick through the wall of ribs holding it in and escape. But it didn't escape when the door to its home was ajar and Harry could see it, no, it stayed and it shouldn't leave now. That's what Harry's hand wants to push in through to it, despairing and begging and hoping and raging: _You're safe now, calm. Calm the fuck down. You're safe with me._

Malfoy's heart is calming, and he tries to breathe a little easier again. Harry feels every pulsidge bleating less fiercely under his skin and slumps and sighs. When he picks up air again, instinct has him do it in sync with Malfoy. That benefits them both.

Like this they sit a while, and before Harry can think of Ron and the situation with Laurent, before he can consider if it would be safe to send word of their position through his patronus, Harry daydreams that he's not scared to care for a person depending on him. He thinks he's not so scared of it anymore. Gently, his stag lowers its head, and its glow has grown lush again. The snout of the aethereal beast fondles the lids of Malfoy's doll still eyes and closes them as though for slumber with two licks of its lucid tongue. It's taking away the last remains of tears that clung to him, too. Malfoy's not crying now.

The outrageous, sappy thumb of Harry starts to smooth over the closest scar it finds, and the outrageous, sappy mouth of him dares to wobble a smile around the whispered promise that might just unbreak the one he gave and could not keep (in another life it seems): “Hey … hey, Malfoy. Tell you what. I'll get you out of here.”

When in the distance the voices of Ron and his companions echo towards them, an astonishing blast of Lumos Maxima rolls thickly far over their heads, making a perfect moment look as though the heaven caught purest fire, illuminating everything. Meeting that light, Harry shines a smile at it, genuine and stretching out from ear to ear. The first time in, he realizes, quite some time. But now help's advancing, and Harry helped his own good deal, even though he did break his broom and can't really apparate. They're going to be alright.

He gives Malfoy's chest a careful but joyful pat.

 "Told you so."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank those few of you who are brave and kind and generous enough to comment on this story. I know many people are too shy to raise their voice online or think their thoughts might not be weighty enough to be shared. Just know I read every comment I receive multiple times, always drawing a little strength from it, no matter if it's a massive essay or just a smiley face.
> 
> I hope you liked how Draco's rescue went down. Next chapter will have the boys united in Grimmauld Place. Things can only get softer now.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> **  
> **  
> [TUMBLR](https://selfdestructian.tumblr.com)  
> 


	8. The boy who left

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to say I'm sorry because this chapter is not what I promised it to be, because it's not what I wanted it to be, because it took me so long, because I don't know when I'll be good enough again to write the next one but my fucking GOD this is fanfiction of all things and it doesn't even matter. 
> 
> No smart title, no pretty picture this time. 
> 
> In the words of the annoying voice of my crippling depression calling itself Nick Cave:  
> "There comes a time when you just cannot deliver."
> 
> Find something to make you at least a somewhat of happy, or don't if the thought of happiness makes you sad, as that's a thing, I know it is. I for my part haven't found my crumb of said happiness yet, and I am godforsaken getting old over the search for it, but hell just fuck it all.  
>   
>  **EDIT:** Yeah so thank my perfectionism, I added a pretty picture and a smart title. I'm a mess, don't even tell me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

To be honest, in a way he's always been a loner. Surely, his friends were worrying about him, and instead of getting better after the war they thought that maybe Harry was just getting a bit worse, but his new state of shell-shocked oddness, surely it was just what a heavy fate as Harry Potter's made of a person in the end?

“He needs his time alone”, that's what Molly would whisper sometimes when she thought that Harry couldn't hear her in the room next door; she'd pat Ginny's shoulder, Gin who wanted to accept him as he'd turned out to be, difficult and distant at times, tiring the youth out of her. But Ginny would shrug irritably under her mother's hand (what Harry would see because he would peek) even though she _wanted_ to accept him, and so bad that it hurt him all it should on her behalf.

“It's probably because you were dead, and … and now there's these times you just don't feel so well.” Something the like theorized Hermione as she squeezed his hand to reassure him that it wasn't his fault he couldn't for the life of him get dressed up and fancy to attend her and Ron's wedding, but betraying her words were the tears in her eyes. There were even more in his own.

“It's because of that _accident_ ”, Ron sighed to the news that Harry, in a fit of despair, had thrown his auror career out of the window and decided to spend some time at Hagrid's hut. A year to be precise, and most of that year hiding himself under his Invisibility Cloak or in the Forbidden Forest.

“Better yer job than yerself. Had ter break somethin', hu? Know that feeling, Harry. Know it all ter well.” Hagrid's beard, turning november grey around the edges, was bristling sadly as he nodded his head with eagerness in spite of his emotion. And maybe, just maybe Harry only asked his big old friend to teach him more about magical creatures because he wanted him to be happy again. Maybe Harry did, at least partly, apply for the job at the _Magical Creature Abuse Control_ because he thought that Hagrid would be so happy for him.

That was how it worked, how Harry worked. He didn't _work_ , and then he was bitterly sorry about it.

But the weeks after Malfoy's rescue are a run through a sanden sea. Harry is like running through the desert, and the endless dunes he climbs and slides off, climbs again, are Prophet headlines and the waiting in between. It's the waiting in between that has him go up the walls of Grimmauld Place. He dreads the gossip rag, and each morning and evening he consumes the new issue as if to draw food for his very life from the dancing words and the pulsing images printed on the pages. His morning coffees taste like sand now, and he drinks them in the evenings, too. He doesn't sleep so well. The dreams of the angry colour red, of wailing children and of stupid strands of silver hair don't become him anyway. He doesn't see his friends anymore, albeit they do visit him. They do try and make sure he's alright. Just, he doesn't heed them any mind. They can be right beside him and they're miles away. They've long stopped trying to understand him, they don't _want_ to understand him anymore, they finally want him to get better - but Harry doesn't care. It's different now, their dynamics. Harry is miles away.

From the mountain cave they transported Malfoy to St. Mungo's in a frantic, and the wildest collection of fragments from that time returns to Harry in his nights and days – blinding, clinical light and the pale pink colour of fingernails, tiny and incredibly human at the tips of two ghastly make-shift wings that hung slack as dead from the sides of the hospital bed -

Laurent had got away. They'd not managed to hold him. And Harry, shocked wild by this information, sat his stubborn guard against all protestations in the sickroom for twenty and seven proud hours no one could take from him. Not even that unpleasant nurse _P. Menkins_ (as read the plastic name tag in bold, black letters between two orange lines) who tried to actually wrestle him out of his uncomfortable visitor's chair – in vain, because Harry grapples with a grit for life or death if he must.

When the healers swarmed into the sickroom, greedy round Malfoy's bed as flies circle dung, their hungry talk and firework of diagnosis charms flooded the cubic space, and in such a manner that it stumped Harry to a blinking mess, squinting his eyes shut with each flash from their wands like he'd used to squint from the cameras of the press. In no time there were diagnostical scrolls all over the place, and endless new ones popping out. Malfoy's chest flew with fright of the razor sharp excitemet surrounding him now, and his wind pipe was whistling distressed while the healers crouched over him: Vultures with a piece of meat tossed under their beaks. They had yet to start treating their patient as a person instead of a miracle holding the key to eternal youth and immortality, but they droned on about abstract medical theories not helping anyone. All the while Harry, blinking the burn out of his eyes, his legs like jelly all of a sudden, Harry sat paralized, and maybe he was really confused and really scared. Maybe he sat like he'd sat in his cupboard when he'd been a little boy, hoping for Vernon or Petunia to take pity on him two days into his punishment and give him a crust of bread and a glass of water after all. Maybe Harry hoped like that again, petrified with fear of disappointment but hoping, always hoping that these people here would _help_. They had to be helping, right? They were healers after all. Malfoy needed their help.

Harry saw the hyperventilating body on the bed. He heard the voices, words, he saw the endless amount of new scrolls bursting from the many wands, piling on the floor, but for a moment that spread out as goo in time he just couldn't place it all.

“ … inner organs running high – incredible - “

“No internal bleedings - no further bone fractures, and it appears - “

“He's healthy. All too healthy!”

“A net of spellworks seems to cover the cerebral tissue like a hood under the skull … “

“ … according to … his heart and arteries heal too quickly to permit transection or intrusion … injury of physical weapons or magical blasts impossible … would enter and leave essential areas like dematerialized, but pain rezeptors are highly responsive here … “

“ - might be triggered by … bold mixture of toxins in the bloodstream … “

“Hallucinogens?”

“Unknown. His current cognitive abilities … yet to be identified … “

“ … but the blood, it would, in theory, be inexhaustible!”

“Impossible!”

“He wouldn't bleed out - “

“This sets all vital functions in a loop, withstanding even lethal damage … the subject will not die.”

“Not age.”

“Maybe.”

“But he should be older if his cells were replacing themselves in such a rapid manner!”

“They're not replacing, they're replicating.”

“And what would insinuate such replication? His bloodstream, not leaking, would have to burst itself.”

“It's different with the brain. It neither replicates nor heals, the indicating triggers are missing here, but it would shrink partially from any intrusion.”

“To minimize the pressure?”

“Does that reach down to the tail of the Medulla?”

“Yes.”

“So, in theory, he'd live with a broken neck.”

“That's smart. Whoever _did_ this must be … “

“This is sensational, a sensation!”

Harry was mentally so stale at this point that he found himself stupidly giggling: The idea of Malfoy's brain _shrinking_ came to him late and comical, and he processed the information as in _the Hogwarts twat Malfoy's_ brain. A tear rolled down his cheek and caught on a dimple formed by his grin. It was only thin water in the flashlights, not a tear at all. Surely Harry's eyes were teary from the flashlights was all.

“But can you fix him?”, he remembers asking out of the blue. “Why don't you fix him?” No one listened to Harry's complaints that grew feebler with each moment passing by. Only hateful nurse Menkins gave him a snort, and another swell of diagnostic charms flittered like shards into Harry's face. Malfoy blew through his nose as do the foals of Pegasoi whenever something has them baulk. Harry would know. He worked with them before.

“Hey - he's scared, he … don't you see, you're _scaring_ him!”

There, he must have jumped up, and the room seemed to spin now, just a bit, and Malfoy's nails were that bloodless pink and so tiny at the tips of his fingers, not much unlike little Rosie's even, and Harry probably should have let someone see to his concussion after all because those unsettling long fingers, it seemed they grew even longer as he looked on. A healer nearly stepped on one as he went about his work, and Harry gave a start, gasping, the memory solid in his palm of a child's hand torn from his grip through the howling storm of a failed apparition.

But did Peggy really slip away, or had Harry let her go? And had Malfoy really been impossible to find, or did Aebischer win his games because Harry'd given up right from the start?

With a lump stuffing his throat, he wondered if these mutated hands would have to stay like this forever now. No one could hold them like this.

The sound of his wand rolling on the linoleum floor is something that still comes back to him now and then. His fist unclenched as if on its own free will that instant, weakness an independent entity in him, and when he thinks of it now his fist unclenches even now, letting his mug of coffee fall or the Prophet he read too often again, spilling splashes of his morning sand or dancing words and pictures on the thick, old rugs of Grimmauld Place.

At one point in Harry's twenty seven hours in St. Mungo's, the healers tried to loosen the petrification on their patient's body to have better access to his vital system and run their medical tests more efficiently. Alas, once Malfoy felt his limbs come back to life he ran for it and turned a whole floor of the hospital upside down, all flapping wings in confined rooms, inarticulate shrieking and occasional burst of flames eventually setting the consultant healer's office on fire, complete with oaken desk and mountains of documents, and at least twelve plastic benches in the corridors. That is something, too, that stayed with Harry: Carbonized plastic biting his nose. The _stink_ of it. In the end, Malfoy fell back onto his mat, his belly up as that that of a dead fish. They had sedated him after all.

But through the fuss, he called Laurent's name, and he called it as if for help: Harry had got him out of hell and Malfoy wanted Laurent. His lips caught some nasty looking blisters from all the fire spitting this time as well, and everything Harry had done to make things better appeared ... futile, in not more than what felt like the blink of an eye. Realization hit Harry late but all the harder for it because he could have seen the signs in the mountain cave already. He _had_ seen them, just not truly recognized what they meant. All of a sudden, everything had been in vain: Malfoy was out of his mind. He wasn't safe. Harry hadn't saved him. At heart, he was still in that cave, on his chain, in the dark, and he _wanted_ to be there because it was what had become his home. For God's sake, Malfoy was _mad_.

Harry dared not even wonder if he'd have to stay like this forever now.

Hours or maybe only minutes later, Hermione handed Harry the papers of his immediate administrative leave form work, and it reasoned _in favor of his mental recovery_ because of _noticable obsessive behaviour disabling objective treatment of the case_.

“Wh... you can't be serious?”

She cried, and she was angry. She was _very_ serious, and now she'd personally seen to get Harry removed from the case after unsuccessfully imploring him, again and again for twenty and seven hours long, to get at least a _bit_ of rest.

Of course Ron was crushed as well, seeing his best friend spit on the floor at the mention of security charms and wards and the dozens of Aurors patrolling the hospital – meaning the like of _we got this, you did all you could, go get some sleep mate, it's fine_ \- but in the end, Harry was right: Those were the same damn Aurors who'd managed to let Laurent get away in the first place! How was Harry supposed to _get some sleep_ while that monster was still out there, and maybe wanting his dragon back?

No, even if Malfoy roasted another dozen benches each day, he'd NEVER return to his abuser!

Passionately, Harry argued as much. However, Ron and Hermione wanted to see him home instead of here, and as soon as beauruecracy let them force him. They had not only to juggle this demanding case and Harry's attitude towards it after all, but also Rosie's stay at Molly's, as well as Mione's own job full of paperwork she had drastically neglected already in favor of helping out.

There was no fighting it, even though Harry did put up a fight.

Weeks have past since. He hasn't set foot in the Ministry nor St. Mungo's, not after taking things too far only three minutes after his suspension and blatantly showing up at the hospital again under the pretense of wanting to visit his good friend Gilderoy Lockhart (whom he then took by the elbow and walked up and down in front of Malfoy's sickroom door, Lockhart trippling along confused and with corn yellow rollers in his hair and pink plushy slippers on his feet). Ron, witnessing this, was positively livid with disappointment.

In consequence, Harry's magical signature was registered to be repelled by all facility buildings concerned with the case of the abduction and resurfacing of Draco Malfoy. Of course Harry put the restrictions to the test. His Invisibility Cloak helped him nothing, however, and he tossed it angrily aside after he'd been apparated home by Robards himself who'd caught him in the act.

But he didn't give up. Of course he didn't. If not inside, Harry decided to sit in front of St. Mungo's, and who wanted to ban him from the park bench in the muggle street that so unknowingly held the entrance to the wizarding hospital? No one. That's right.

Because no one paid him any mind here.

Magical people either flooed or apparated into the building, so he could have been at the north pole and it wouldn't have been less useful of him. And Laurent was a criminal. Such folk didn't use the front door anyway. Harry was ridiculous, and it took him almost another eleven hours to admit as much to himself. Night had fallen by then, he hadn't eaten enough, nervous cold sweat had gathered in his armpits under the clothes that were too thin for the weather. Stray cats noisily bullied each other in the shades of the distance. Harry's head hammered with pain, and it was no use. Harry was no _use_ , and useless as he was he stared at the front of the hospital across the steet, no more than an old, abandoned department store. That's how the muggles saw it, and how Harry was left to see it, too, because this was his situation; he was not allowed inside, just like the muggles were. Shut out was he. Cut off. Put on cold turkey.

It was bad luck that, instead of sitting here, he could have tried and started to track Laurent down on his own right away, and he cursed himself suddenly for not having done so. Now he had no access to the Ministry. No access to his MCAC office and definitely not the auror's evidence archives. Ron wouldn't have fed him any informations anymore. Neither Hermione. A surge of cold anger clamped down hard in Harry's throat and he got difficulties breathing. Worst was maybe that they thought they were acting in his best interest.

And maybe for the first time in his life, Harry couldn't think as of friends of them, and he shuddered.

With the gush of a nasty night wind, a muggle newspaper caught on his knee. He took it, scrumpled it up in a fit and threw it hard over the street against the window behind which the enchanted mannequin all but mocked his isolation; it didn't move, it didn't even twinkle the littlest spark of magic through its plastic eyes at him to acknowledge his presence.

Harry went home, red and white in the face from snorting with helpless rage. At dusty Grimmauld Place he trodded lost like drunk through the poorly lit foyer and up the stairs to the first floor. A flash of yellow light was thrown across the carpet and crawling up the wall: Through a crack in one of the heavy doors Harry could see that in the great drawing room Kreacher sat devoured by the large couch in front of the TV Harry had installed with Ginny years ago.

The bitter elf greeted Harry's return with all the tired malice he would always muster for him, meaning Kreacher grunted and never looked over his bony shoulder. If he'd heard Harry at all, that is. Maybe he was getting a bit deaf, and the rugs were eating quite a lot of noise that footfalls made. Or maybe he just didn't like Harry as much. He wasn't Dobby. Harry wasn't ever going to make him another Dobby, and maybe he never should have tried.

A commercial just ended, and the muffled sound of pleasant music filtered out of the room, reaching Harry but not embracing him as he stood apart in the dark and lonely hallway.

“Thank you for being a friend”, sang the theme song of what Kreacher would never admit to call his favorite show, the Golden Girls. Harry knew for a fact that the elf was crushing hard on snarky-mouthed Dorothy, and he couldn't really blame him for it.

“Travel down the road and back again”, formed Harry's mouth with the song; he could have sung along easily. He did sometimes, trying to get Kreacher to join in, ever failing, ever trying nonetheless.

“Your heart is true, you're a - ” ... _pal and a confidant …_

As if to not see something horrible, Harry clenched his eyes shut, but he _saw_ , he saw it again with a pulsing flash behind his eyelids; Harry saw the heart, _your heart is true_ , the dragon's heart beating slowly in the midst of a torn open chest.

What if Laurent had him back already and all Harry could do was stand here and do nothing?

_Youreapalyoureapalyoureapal and a confidant - - -_

It's true, in a way Harry has always been on his own. Hermione, Ron and everyone, they … he loved them, and they him, he knew. But he felt so alone, standing uselessly in the shadows of a house that had never quite become his home.

Biting his fist as if to stuff back his hiccoughing sobs that all of a sudden wanted to errupt from him, Harry abruptly hurried down the aisle, nearly running from the silly, happy song until he found his bedroom door. Thoughts stormed his mind, a right storm of thoughts it was, and it was howling, fueled by that silly, happy, viscious song; it bit him that night, strong jawed and tight around his chest. He heaved himself onto the dusty covers of his bed. His limbs were lead, thrumming with sluggish and thick lead instead of blood. The ceiling danced a steady circle above Harry's head.

If he'd found Malfoy earlier, maybe he wouldn't have lost his mind. If Harry had just found him, who knows, maybe they could have been friends after all, the two of them a pair of damaged singletons after the war. They'd had a thing starting there, talking on the steps of Hogwarts.

And what if they could have been friends, all these nine years lost?

He didn't want to see it, no, he didn't, and he pressed the heels of his hands into his overflowing eyes - but a devastating heartbeat long a Malfoy that could never have been was with Harry when he grabbed a little girl's hand, and just when that curse was shot Harry's way, a Malfoy that had never been but who'd become an auror as well, an auror and Harry's friend, that Malfoy blocked the curse before it could hit Harry's scar. It was good timing, too, because like this Harry never even wasted another thought on Tom Riddle again, and like that he took Peggy's hand safely and apparated her into her parents' waiting arms.

The morning after Harry'd cried himself dry into the greedy sheets of his bed, dust clung to his face. He felt his eyes were sandy, and for the first time in his godforsaken life he subscribed to the dearly hated Daily Prophet. The first issue delivered to him had a comatose teenage boy with mutilated arms splayed across the front page, and the article read:

 

 _**THE BOY WHO LEFT except that he didn't:** _ _Missing Malfoy heir and youngest Death Eater in history found associated with illegal underground society in Knockturn Alley after nearly one decade of alleged absence.  
_ _Read more on page ..._

 

 


	9. But snarl they can

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been three months and I have no excuse lol.
> 
> I hope you have been fine out there, little lights, and I hope you continue to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

_**THE BOY WHO LEFT except that he didn't:** _

_Missing Malfoy heir and youngest Death Eater in history found associated with illegal underground society in Knockturn Alley after nearly one decade of alleged absence!_

_Maybe the sensation of the year has been brought before us by the word of Head-Auror ROBARDS this past weekend: DRACO MALFOY, whom authorities reported missing just shy of his trials after the war, has been unexpectedly picked up due to an anonymous tip regarding his whereabouts. MALFOY, being in a vile and mysterious state of mutation and receiving treatment in ST. MUNGOS this instant, had apparently been hiding under a tiny retail outlet in KNOCKTURN ALLEY all this time._

_The shop, namely OLDLAND'S ODDITIES, which sells dubious magical goods that rival BORGIN'S any day, is run by a man called LAURENT OLDLAND who has fled the aurors upon confrontation. OLDLAND has the reputaion of a skilled poisoneer and is said to be agile with outlandish, borderline wandwork considered highly dangerous. He is officially wanted to file a statement to the outrageously curious case of his basement lodger (see OLDLAND'S composit sketch and a guide on how to act in case of sighting attached to the last page of this issue)._

_What reasons did OLDLAND have to help MALFOY hide from the public this long? Was he paid for or pressured into offering shelter? And were there others involved in their secret?_

_The basement of the shop, so ROBARDS, connects through a massive work of distinctly illegal charmwork to an isolated cave in the mountains of Northern Ireland wherefrom MALFOY was taken into custody. If he'd ever left that cave in the while of his stay is not known, at least no sightings of him have been reported to the Wizarding Community of neither Great Britain nor Ireland since his disappearance nine years ago._

_The motifs of MALFOY for remaining hidden in plain sight while he could have easily fled to the continent are as of yet unknown as well. Further, the off-putting alterations to his physical appearance leave us at a loss. With wings that once were arms, DRACO MALFOY is a parody of his own given name. Odd appears also the fact that he looks to be much younger that the 27 years of age he would be today. This apparent state of maintained youth reminds dubiously of how his demised master TOM RIDDLE / LORD VOLDEMORT has been trying to achieve immortality before him. MALFOY'S residing underground in such crazed a guise strongly suggests he may have developed a megalomaniac madness since and maybe started a secret cult of Neo-Death Eaters who would be practicing bestial rituals to revoke their master once again._

_Being a pureblood heir, MALFOY has been known for his racist utterances and showing-off of his conceited supremacy even in his days at school._

“ _He was always full of himself”, COMRAC MCLAGGEN informs us, a former peer of MALFOY at HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WIRCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY. “Everyone was far beneath him. That's how he carried himself. No one could stand him though, but that didn't stop him from kissing his face in the mirror. Inbreeds I say. It's just how they are.”_

_Considering this moral background, could MALFOY even have attempted to become a new Dark Lord himself? We can only speculate at this point._

“ _I cannot let you interview him now”, tells us ROBARDS. In favor of ST. MUNGOS' diagnostical efforts, MALFOY has been put under the influence of a sedative. The mental capability of him can apparently not be judged this early into his treatment we are further told, and that the medis are just in the process of understanding the basics of MALFOY'S current state of health. But we are granted the incredible shot for our article as you see in full terrible glory printed on the front page of today's issue._

_Until further notice, our team of star journalists, featuring always-eager RITA SKEETER, will have to wait on their chance to unveil the whole truth. We hope to fill you in with fresh details as soon as possible._

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

 

_**COLD CASE BOILING!** _

_Only hours after the release of our exclusive printed reveal of the dubious resurfacing of DRACO MALFOY, a crowd of demonstrants went rampant in front of ST. MUNGOS HOSPITAL: Their demand that the former Death Eater be tried for his war crimes after all have as of yet neither been answered by the Ministry nor the medi-wizards treating the patient in question. However, the situation had an alarming number of Muggles become witnesses to magic due to summoned banners shouting slogans as “CAGE THE CRIPPLE” through the sky, lettered in deep, explosive burgundy: The color of the people's rage._

“ _Our Ministry betrays us with treating that murderer in ST. MUNGOS”, declares one demonstrant, DICK HAT, who was willing to bring the matter of complaint to us. “Our weak and ill are perched under the same roof as that MALFOY spawn, being in constant danger around him! We, the voice of reason and of the people, demand this threat of a person to be removed immediately from the place that should be a refuge for the ones deserving of it!”_

_A high skilled squad of OBLIVIATORS reported back to us that they had managed to put all unwanted magical memories down in the witnessing Muggles. Further exposure of the Wizarding Community in an openly muggle street has been forestalled: The demonstrants were to move their concern to DIAGON ALLEY and patrol in front of the SEAT OF WIZARDING RIGHTS this instant._

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

 

_**MALFOY MADNESS MULTIPLIES:** _

_LUCIUS MALFOY, imprisoned Death Eater and supporter of the late despot TOM RIDDLE / LORD VOLDEMORT, has started a fist fight of eventually 37 participating convicts in the refectory of AZKABAN prison, presumably to get hold of a copy of the DAILY PROPHET showing his long lost son, DRACO MALFOY. Our star reportee, RITA SKEETER, sought to interview the violent father of the heir to a totalitarian prureblooded line of wizards. However, she was not granted permission to have word with the captive._

_What does he know about his son's odd whereabouts? And where is his wife at this point, NARCISSA MALFOY?_

_As much of a fuss as she made for the first three years of her son's being missing, ever since there has nothing been heard of her. Today, she has yet to make an appearance. Having raised many eyebrows with her public lamentations in the past, the MOTHER MALFOY might be raising even more suspicion with silence now. Maybe, having ventured out of Britain to look for her son around the globe, the news might not have reached her yet – or maybe, unbeknownst to our media, she already passed away of sorrow, making herself a widower's wife._

_Only time will tell – and the DAILY PROPHET!_

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

 

_**HANS HEYNRICH AEBISCHER – messiah or monster?** _

_Only this morning have the revolting news reached us: The high ranked secretary of the MINISTRY OF MAGIC and well known founder of the humanitarian campaign WIGGLE has admitted to more than 500 children being abducted on his behalf in the course of the last 20 years. His victims were of half-blooded or muggle only heritage without exception, all under the age of 5 years but able to perform infant magic. Not a single child taken by AEBISCHER, so Head-Auror ROBARDS states, has ever been found, a great number of which were taken from non-magical families long before they learned their children had magical potential altogether. It is yet to be clarified exactly what happened to them and what they were taken for to begin with._

_In devastating irony, AEBISCHER'S flashing campaign WIGGLE claims to want to vanquish every last belief in magical inability stemming from a muggle heritage in witches and wizards. However, compared to the secret business of human trade AEBISCHER ran for two decades in secret, WIGGLE distinguishes itself as relatively young and can thus not have been the motor for the many abductions. Rather, WIGGLE likely served as a shield for AEBISCHER'S true intentions in a time of growing wizard-muggle bonds that started to bloom right after the war. Indeed, a time in which muggle parents of magical children are debated to be introduced to the Wizarding World long before their children's attendance of a wizarding school must have been threatening to AEBISCHER'S work, whatever his shrouded goals therein._

_ROBARDS: “We are still in the process of recording a complete list of names. Only once this will be done, official investigations can be run and hopefully timely finished, and only after that, the bereaved families will be informed of their children's fates. Our hopes of finding any of them alive are low. The media will be updated as the cases unravel. However, due to respect of the mourning, the list of names will not be published in a forseeable span of time.”_

_AEBISCHER remains in investigative custody at the heart of the Ministry Of Magic until further notice. His trial is set to be held around the end of September, the definite date not yet decided upon._

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

  

_**A SAMARITAN'S LIFE:** _

_On Wednesday morning, OLDERICK KEYNSTEN, war veteran and peacemaker, has been spotted wandering the streets of Muggle London in full Obliviation's haze. He was immediately brought into the care of ST. MUNGOS' department specializing on the restoration of memories altered, fragmented and lost by spellwork. His brain however, so the responsible medi-witch PEPRO NEE, appears to have suffered a severe blow of amnesia, and it is yet to be seen if his memory can ever be reestablished._

“ _The Obliviation appears to have been strengthened by a potion unknown to our textbooks”, so NEE. “Remainders have been traced in Sir KEYNSTEN's body. We are assuming that it would have worked as an amplifier to the memory-destructive spell.”_

_But who would maul a peacemaker's mind, we ask ourselves, and grab the albeit sad but perfect opportunity to salute KEYNSTEN for all his wonderful social work he has bestowed upon our wizarding community in the ruins of our last devastating war. Especially now, with the likes of AEBISCHER being unmasked, we fear for one of our best and hope to get him back in one mental piece as soon as possible._

_Read more about KEYNSTEN'S accomplishments on page 6 to 18._

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

 

_**THE BOY 'S ARREST: Malfoy moved!** _

_No, sadly not out of ST. MUNGOS altogether, as many demonstrants are to this day noisily demanding in front of the SEAT OF WIZARDING RIGHTS, but apparently into the hospital's basement like a diva checks into a private suite._

_A patient of ST. MUNGOS, who had been stationed on the same floor as the MALFOY heir because of a magical malady he wishes to remain unnamed, wants to have overheard a conversation of two staff medis. Apparently, they had voiced concerns for their other patients' safety around MALFOY, never mentioned these to the public, however, which will surely raise an outrage amongst people._

“ _They said they'd have to isolate him”, we are told, “so that they'd have better control over him. They pondered the basement as there's no one else treated down there and he couldn't mess about so much. They kept him knocked out most of the time while he was with us, but sometimes I heard him making horrible noises, like animal noises, and then flames shot through the keyhole of his door sometimes. I'd seen that when I went to the loo. And he'd bump into the walls, you could hear that, when, I think, he tried to fly around or something, with these scary, ugly things on his hands, you know. The medis kept talking about some samples they needed to take, and that the potions they gave him to keep calm would falsify the state of his blood or something. They seemed really keen on getting these samples. Said 'before it fades' repeatedly. Now the night before I was discharged, I could hear them making a rumpus in his room and moving his bed down the hall.”_

_What secret doesn't ST. MUNGOS want us to know? Why would they not let go of a patient endangering the others? What with these 'animal noises' heard from MALFOY'S sickroom, and the fire? And what would be so interesing about his blood?_

_RITA SKEETER has done her homework and formed a top 5 of thrilling theories! Read more on page 7._

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

 

_**AEBISCHER'S ATONEMENT.** _

_The 26 th of September has officially been chosen to be the day of the infamous criminal's trial. _

_Meanwhile, the swiss wizarding authorities have filed a charge against the british. Their claim asks the convict AEBISCHER, who is in fact still of swiss nationality, to be handed over into the hands of Switzerland's judiciary which still includes the possibility of the DEMENTOR'S KISS among other traditional practices the british Wizarding Community has had to let go of because of fatal experiences within the time of the Second Wizarding War. However, the MINISTRY OF MAGIC has dismissed Switzerland's request. That the multitude of AEBISCHER's crimes have been commited within Great Britain was expressed against delivering him as much as his own decades-long stay, living and working legally, in the UK ._

_If this is going to muzzle the swiss Wizarding Community from claiming their countryman for their own punishment is yet to be seen. Here in our AZKABAN, the child abductor's sentence is forseeably going to be imprisonment for life without the allowance to ever perform magic again. Would Switzerland rather have him KISSED, and would that punishment serve his unspeakable crimes better?_

_Read more about what fate could await AEBISCHER in his country of birth on page 12._

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

 

_**THE BOY WHO'S DAFT!** _

_Has DRACO MALFOY been consuming brain damaging drugs in his years as an irish cave-man? Finally, ST. MUNGOS speaks up!_

_A staff member of our basic institution of magical health, whereat the junior MALFOY is still hospitalized under great secrecy, has come forth to feed us all the details of the youngest Death Eater's current condition. Our informant wishes to remain anonymous, so we shall call him KEVIN in the following interview._

_SKEETER: Hello and welcome, KEVIN! 'THE PROPHET' is utterly pleased to talk to you!_

_KEVIN: Thanks. It's a change for sure from the medi-wizard's daily routine._

_SKEETER: And what a routine that must have been lately! You are with a team of – how many? - medi-witches and wizards in charge of the infamous patient DRACO MALFOY! Rumors have it that he acts like a beast of the primeval wild!_

_KEVIN: Yes, yes, it's been rather intense. There's twelve of us medis and five nurses in total._

_SKEETER: So MALFOY made his treatment a pain to you?_

_KEVIN (laughing): As much as a volcano with hiccups would._

_SKEETER: Is it true that he spits fire then?_

_KEVIN: Well, not today._

_SKEETER: But he did?_

_KEVIN: I'm telling you enough when I say there was a big deal off about his body when we got him. By now we have him mostly back to normal though. There is almost no scarring from re-shrinking his fingers, for example, and his shoulders have located back in place just fine._

_SKEETER: But you are keeping him in your basement? Sources tell me you were forced to isolate him from the other patients because he was dangerous!_

_KEVIN: We did isolate him, but in response to the public outrage, mostly. All those howlers exploding against his door were starting to upset the whole personnel as well as our patients close by, so this needed to stop._

_SKEETER: But ST. MUNGOS never informed the public about this decision!_

_KEVIN: We are doing it right now._

_SKEETER: I see. Then tell me, did the change of scene improve MALFOY'S monstrous moods? Does he feel more at home in the dumps, as surely he would have grown accustomed to basements by now?_

_KEVIN (laughing again): I am not that kind of doctor! He's yet to see a mind healer for a proper psychological survey._

_SKEETER: Why, is there something off about his brains as well?_

_KEVIN: The Ministry has ordered a thorough determinition of his cognitive capabilities._

_SKEETER: Do I hear you telling me of a long-overdue trial, Kev?_

_KEVIN: You hear me saying that if MALFOY won't prove mentally fit enough there's a chance he'll have to stay with us._

_SKEETER: Young life wasting away in the asylum! I am already lettering the headline - how old is he again, say? I reckon he disappeared before his 18 th birthday, and as far as THE PROPHET'S fabled photograph of him tells us he aged outrageously well – that means not at all!_

_KEVIN: Well, on the documents he is 27 years of age, goes without saying. However, physically he appears to have been stuck in his late teens for quite a while, that is true._

_SKEETER: What wouldn't I give to know his secret! Do you?_

_KEVIN: The patient DRACO MALFOY, you need to understand, has been brought to us under the influence of an unknown substance in his blood. The formula of it is still mostly unfathomable to us. Unfortunately, we were not able to decode it by the time it had started to disintegrate. However, we do have reasons to believe that our patient's age dysfunction was tied to the influence of named substance. It was only after it had fully dissolved that we detected an actual aging process kicking in, and we don't know whether it will last or stop again, or how quickly it will proceed._

_SKEETER: Does that mean MALFOY ingested this drug since his teenage days?_

_KEVIN: It could appear as such, but too little is known about it to tell the exact period of usage. We are still puzzled as to how it affected his organism. However, what we do know is that the shock of it's absence has the same effect on him as would an abrupt withdrawal after years of intoxication. We have put him into a magical coma until his signs of withdrawal will have worn off. He'll be infused with lowering doses of substituding potions to keep him stable, as well as ones for reconstitutioning altogether. It won't be before October that we'll have him concious again._

_SKEETER: Thank you very much for your time, KEVIN. This interview gives us a much deserved insight into your work. Hopefully we'll talk again soon!_

 

~~~~~~~~~ 

 

 

 

_**LUCIUS MALFOY collapsed in prison cell:**  _

_To force agreement with his authorities, the father of DRACO MALFOY went on a hunger strike so he would be allowed to visit his son, presently stationed in ST. MUNGOS wizarding hospital. Having from this endeavour succumbed to a state of beriddenness, he had to be tranfered to AZKABAN'S infirmary. Magical means to feed him back to health are pondered at this point, informs us healer LAY WHELLES. However, the magical feeding of a person without their written consent is as of now lawfully considered illegal which is why the prison nurses have to default on a more muggle version of the procedure that is promising less success and much more trouble, because even now, so we further learn, does the senior MALFOY refuse to eat._

_AZKABAN'S chairman FERDINANT POPPELWHEE tells us that the inmate's demand is not met with permittance, but finally we of the DAILY PROPHET are allowed to have him for an exclusive interview._

“ _I want to see my son”, says MALFOY stubbornly as RITA SKEETER's truth seekers confront him after all._

_We find him strapped to a hospital cot. His sheets are stained with spoonfuls of drying porridge we imagine he was served by hand but would not swallow. His whole appearance is gaunt and wild as that of a rabid animal. But no hunger strike does this to a person. Also, no Dementor would have touched MALFOY since he returned for his second and final stay in AZKABAN - the prison's post-war reform has flourished and made the whole installment, back in the days gloomy and bone-scaring, a right harbourage in ecrú. Too pleasant and too comforting, one could argue, for the people of our population who commited such reckless crimes as did LUCIUS MALFOY himself, a terrorist and a murderer._

_But however pleasant the surroundings, MALFOY'S eyes, as we speak, are possessed by a mad gleam to them, and he appears to have lost his grip on reality and the ongoing of time altogether: Like a relic of another era he tries to command his will while he's long been put into the spot of one to bow to others._

“ _I want to see my son!” he repeats feverishly, and maybe because he forgot that he already said the words._

_To force his wish granted, a litany of deeds he'd perform in exchange follows, one of them being to volunteer for a possibly risky muggle blood transfusion which was discussed by the WIGGLE company for the past two years: It was meant to further explore and hopefully help eliminate the myth of blood differences between wizards and muggles and those in between._

“ _And if I lose my magic, I will do it!”, LUCIUS MALFOY exclaims with all the drama of a privileged pureblood. However, in trying to impress with selflessness, the imprisoned Death Eater associates his person with lately charged H. H. AEBISCHER who happens to be the original founder of WIGGLE and responsible for countless crimes against children of mixed magical blood. Inhowfar the senior MALFOY is aware of AEBISCHER'S recent situation with the law remains cloudy as he will not answer nor listen to any of our questions but instead keeps ranting on._

_That he would be involved with the likes of AEBISCHER should not have been surprising our loyal team of journalists at all._

 

_~~~~~~~~~_

 

 

 

_**OUR MONUMENTAL STEP TOWARDS EQUALITY:** Aebischer sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in AZKABAN._

_In a gathering taking no longer than one minute, the sacred Wizentgamot decreed in unison that this villain against the Wizarding World's hope for a more tolerant and understanding future has no rightful place in it but in banishment. As a living example of what terrible deeds hatred between wizards and muggles inspires, he will live out his irredeemable days behind bars._

_Read every detail on this unparralelled political statement on page  4 ..._

 

_~~~~~~~~~_

 

 

 

When the world is upside down, it has spun you around by the ancles and stood you on top of your head. When the world does that, so it may appear, it wants you to remember how to put your feet back on the ground.

“Mister ... Potter?”

It's obvious that, just like Harry himself, Lucius Malfoy cannot begin to comprehend why of all people the forgotten saviour of the wizarding world would be visiting him at his prison hospital cot. The man in restraint, a beast in a corner behind his mask of preeminence, fixes his bloodshot gaze on Harry as if he could judge his guest's intentions from the colour of the rings under his eyes.

They're just the same worn purple as his own.

Harry grinds his teeth. His presence here is that of a tall, dark spike, erect and shaking with disgust as he stands a cut through the sharp light and the clinical stench of the room. Down under his gaze, the unkempt strands of Malfoy's pallid hair lie sticking to his night's sweat and the crusting remains of spewn out food on his pillow. Harry wants to yank them out like weeds.

That Harry was a brat when they first met, the senior Malfoy towering above him like a prosperous menace. It's ridiculous to be looking at him now as if in reverse. Looking at him turned childish with age. Old and helpless. Too stubborn to realize that that's what he is.

“Mister Malfoy.” Harry curtly nods.

“Why - “

Irritated already, Harry shrugs his shoulders too harshly to come across indifferent. He doesn't _know_ why he's here. Heck, he does, but he'd rather he did not.

“Maybe I wanted to tell you that Cormac McLaggen beats his wife?”

Straining his neck, Malfoy frowns. The leather belts keeping him in place crunch around his famished frame, only a whisper of their true command - but no matter how faint, the sound sends Harry boiling with anger at this complete idiot lying there; he could be on his deathbed for all he appears, and still he wants to make believe that he's in control, that he's in the process of wearing down the system instead of himself, triumphant Lucius Malfoy and his idiotic hunger strike!

“Excuse … ?“

“MCLAGGEN, who talks SHIT in that article, you know that _article_ , McLaggen, he gets drunk and beats his wife and she doesn't complain, she never complains, and when I was still an Auror, _way_ back then, when we picked her up because the neighbours had called us, it hadn't even been the first time! They got married in June because she _doesn't complain_ , and now he goes and thinks he can talk _shit_ about _-_!”

Shaking suddenly, Harry curses and bares his teeth. In a fit, his fists grab at his temples, and his fainting rage has him topple over just a bit. Harry would squeeze his head to mush if only that could erase all the bawling injustices this life had him yet stomach. A wish unfulfillable is that of course, but pressure grounds him nonetheless - so he squeezes.

Looking waxen with appalment of Harry's sudden demeanour, Lucius Malfoy grows rapidly stuffed silent with complaints he dares not raise to voice, and visible apprehension moistens the twitch of his brow.

Harry would laugh. Only he doesn't feel like it.

Since his accident with Peggy Fawn went public, people do believe him to be quite unstable. People also know him to be powerful. Like lightning strikes. Poetic and cruel and awe-inspiring, that stuff from which Rita Skeeter spins a modern myth. She did that back then with Harry, one more time, while none of it was true. Because had Harry only ever been _really_ powerful, so many things would be different today.

In any case, this old snake here has not yet made up his mind whether that trampling lion be worth his bite. Not that Malfoy had fangs or words to impress Harry with, no, he could shut right up. It's not listening that Harry came here for.

The walls of Azkaban are really painted in ercú nowadays. Harry'd bet the cells have cushioned beds now, too, and a little chair and table and each a nice flower pot in the window sill. Aebischer's having it _nice_ in here, Harry would bet.

_Disgusting._

It's not like he should have come to begin with. But there's never anything about Laurent Oldland in the papers, not since that one first time. The bastard is an eel, a glob of snot. They're not _getting_ him. That's part of why Harry barely knows himself anymore. That's why he bites his fingernails until he tastes the tang of metal. It's why his thoughts are scaring him when he's alone sometimes - and Harry's constantly alone now, he made sure he'd be. That one bad Thursday morning when he blocked his fireplace with one montrosity of Grimmauld's ancient wing chairs.

Today, Harry read the headline of Aebischer moving into Azkaban for good. To this blunt reality he felt like tearing at the seams and he very likely did, because, without bothering to cut the article out and add it to the stack he keeps in that upper kitchen drawer Molly doesn't reach, he sat his mug atop of it, careless of the coffee ring it would make. He went to put on something more presentable than his excuse for proper pajamas; his washed out tee and sweat pants which he had not seen much reason to change for something else all through the end of August and the whole of September. Today, Harry went for his wardrobe with its squeal in the left lower hinge, and he picked a pair of slacks and shirt and coat safe to be seen in publicly. He showered, made a whole ceremony of the act. He even shaved. Removed the wing chair from his floo. Then called the Wizarding Prison of Azkaban to make an appointment for a private visit.

But when asked whom he wished to see, his mouth failed to form the name. _Lucius Malfoy_ he blurted instead. Because Aebischer really looks a lot like him, or him in his better days, and that's how association works, and really meeting Aebischer another one last time suddenly appeared baneful to the last alert shred of Harry's soul.

It wouldn't have made a difference anyway, which made it all the more impossible to face.

Of course, Lucius Malfoy is none of Harry's concern. His son's fate on the other hand has quite frankly become what Hermione calls Harry's compensatory fixation. It's more than than, however. It's less than that maybe. Harry didn't put anyone in Peggy's place: She's still snuggled up in that gash of his heart that is hers and hers alone. Now, a dragon tore himself a new gash is all, and he flaps his sharp-edged wings in it with each Daily Prophet that doesn't say he'll be alright. Draco Malfoy went into Harry's heart and he's flailing around in it. It's complicated but simple as that.

Harry really shouldn't have come to Azkaban today, that's what Ron would tell him, too. Harry was tearing at the seams, however, because  _somewhere_  itching under his skin he felt old and helpless and too stubborn to realize that – maybe - he might be just that. He had to get  _moving_  again. And even if Lucius Malfoy is none of his concern, the man's current position does on a destructed level resonate with Harry's own. They've both got their hands tied, and no hunger strike and no hiding out in Grimmauld Place will change that for good.

“McLaggen”, Harry pushes through his teeth again as if it even mattered. “Beats his wife.” _And thinks he can go and tell shit about things he knows nothing about._

Malfoy's eyes on Harry, empty but suddenly so hungry from it, narrow in a flash of smart recognition – his gaze strikes and sticks his teeth into a thought between them as if into an unsuspected feast to the starving of his mind.

“I understand you are not an Auror, Potter.”

The sting of bitterness forcing his ugliest smile, Harry snorts; like anybody wouldn't know.

But Malfoy probes on: “The Aurors don't reply to my owls. No one comes here. But you're here, Potter. You're not involved in my son's case.”

_Anymore. No._

“Why – why are you here?” Crack and crash, the calculation of Malfoy's words collapses too easily into the breathless sound of greed and hope and terror, and he's bracing himself against his restraints in useless fight now. “You're _here_ , Potter, you're here for my - Draco, is this about Draco? What do you know about - do you _know_ something? Tell me what you _know_ , Potter, what- ”

As if by a fist forced back into him, a breath hitches in the back of Harry's throat. This outburst unfolding, coming with the flipping of voice and the flowing of sweat, it's a farce to behold, to try and see more in this hysterical father, more of his son or his son's abductor in him that is. Harry's guts twist from the display, and for a moment he stands in the irreconcilable gulf that yawns so deep between hatred and sympathy. He can't decide what's less exhausting to feel.

That man wriggling beneath him as do worms pulled out of dirt, that man has murdered innocents, maybe children among them,  _Ginny_ nearly, and willingly so, and he would murder again - only himself this time and only to undo what has been done to that flicker of a friend, that fond idea Harry invited to flail around in his sore chest.

Who even is Harry to judge anyone after all?

Harry is that fool who loved Ginny and lost her, even though she's still alive he lost her, and Harry is that fool who loved the dream of having kids; he lost them when he lost his grasp on Peggy's little hand. Harry lost that Draco whom he never got to know.

God, is he sick of losing all the time.

The faintest glance that has him recognize the faded mark of Voldemort on Malfoy's fastened arm reminds Harry to catch fire again, and real, fierce fire; If nothing else, Malfoy _owes_ him, he owes the whole Wizarding World, and he's not paying his many debts good enough strapped to a stupid hospital cot.

With a decisive grunt, Harry jumps him, crouching to the level of his eyes - Malfoy gasps when Harry grabs his face hard to give it a shake because his disgusting and useless breath is sour and ill from his idiotic hunger strike, because his skin is like a page on which is written too much and too little of substance still.

“ _Look_ at you”, Harry all but spits. “Don't even _get_ it, do you?”

Just imagining that, right now, this instant, Aebischer is _here,_ right here in Azkaban, in Lucius Malfoy's reach - if only that snivelling bastard would take this opportunity that Harry envies him so.

Malfoy whines with big whites in his eyes, and he wriggles under the steel of Harry's grip. Harry will not let him go. Bruising for sure, Malfoy lets out a whimper that has Harry shake him again.

“You know what the papers don't tell you?! That _I_ found your son, that _I_ was there and McLaggen was not! They don't tell you that they fucked him in the head-”

“ _What?_ ”

“- and they kept him like an animal down there -”

“Wha- _Draco?!_ ”

“- that Keynsten tortured him down there, he paid fucking _galleons_ to torture him and he wasn't the only one, and - !”

No one tells you that the Obliviation on Keynsten screams the signature of Laurent Oldland. That Laurent Oldland's going round vanishing evidence of his business. That it's just a matter of time before he'd come for his greatest witness yet, currently lying immobilized in the bowels of St. Mungos.

Harry can't say that. It gets stuck inside a raging need to swallow. His grip flexes hard as he does, and the feeling of long stubble and sticky skin seems to want to press through his own skin as he grinds another man's yaw. Malfoy gasps again. No, he's only breathing, Harry understands, and he gasps his breaths because he weeps.

The sob in the man's voice leaves a tangle of the words he needs to say, but Harry catches them all the same: “... what, did they ... _do_ to him?”

Prostration is a blanket, sodden, heavy blanket that falls hard; now it brings Harry to his knees. On a sigh, he presses his forehead into the edge of the mattress which smells like humid surrender. His hand, as it gives up its furious claim, slips free, and, detached from the action, Harry wipes what must be a Death Eater's tears off on said man's chest: The fabric he wear is coarse, bleached wool. It doesn't drink.

Into the silence, Malfoy whispers: "Draco ... went for the toilets. We'd been in the Ministry's court wing. It was about twenty minutes before his trial. I – do remember seeing you, Potter. He saw you, too, from a distance. He used to throw up in that time. He just went to the toilets and ... didn't come back. That's unlike him. He was too scared to run away on his own. Cissy and I, we - his mother and I, he never said a word to us about escape. We never knew what happened to him, and she went to find him. I haven't seen her since, she doesn't write, they both just. They were _gone_ and I was going _mad_ in here. I'm going _mad_ , Potter, please, if you know _anything …_ "

But Harry shakes his head. More to shake off the memories, the dreams, than to tell the other no.

Against Harry's temple, Malfoy's breath is sour and ill. A dying predator's last bite could smell like this. Sour and ill and having nothing left to lose.

“I think you should start eating again, Mister Malfoy, because I know who took your son.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

**_BREAKING NEWS: AEBISCHER FOUND DEAD._ **

_Under mysterious circumstances, the freshly imprisoned H. H. AEBISCHER has been found lifeless on the floor of AZKABAN'S hallway leading from the cells to the prison yard. Exercise time had just been past when the warders took notice of his absence._

_"His neck was snapped", reports warder JUSTICE NOWHE who was the one to find the body. "It didn't look like he fell, or like he fought someone. No outside trauma was visible, aside from his neck that is, and our first magical examination positively excluded any sort of curse performed on him. Right now we're at a loss about what happened," ..._

 

 

Autumn rain comes weeping slow and thick against the windows of Grimmauld Place. It brings acorn leaves for hands, smoothing hands, stroking hands in crumbled gold and red and brown that plaster their condolence to the glass. Inside, a soaking wet newspaper lands with a slap on the floor. Harry, by everything so shockingly uncaressed, climbs into bed again even though it's not that late at all and some funny feeling's dragging at his ancles. The world is dragging him out, get up, get out, get doing _something_ now, now that you _can_ , but Harry ... oh, Harry. He can't. The sigh he sighs tells the world to fuck off just a little longer. Harry slumps into bed again and slips under his covers in a whole, pretending that he didn't get up yet, that he didn't open the window for the poor post owl delivering his Prophet through the pouring rain. Pretending that he didn't. He did  _not_.

_But he did, and I told him to._

" _Thank you for being a friend_ ", slurs Kreacher's early telly rerun down the hall as it does every single day in Grimmauld Place, morning and evening. This morning, one more time, it sounds like gentle miles away.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the last one that has Harry and Draco apart. BIG ASS PROMISE. Next time we'll also hear our dragon talk for real after all this junk.  
> Thank you so much for your lovely comments, as again, I have relished in them. I was asked where I take the pretty pictures from: Just random free stock from google really lol. I hope you enjoy the individual touch above each chapter as much as I do!
> 
> Dear CINTAMI btw, yes! I found you on TUMBLR and saw I already followed you back. So happy to have you around there. Don't shy away from sending asks or messages, I really don't bite and try to respond as soon as life lets me.
> 
> Hope to keep the chapters coming more frequently again ~
> 
> **  
> **  
> [TUMBLR](https://selfdestructian.tumblr.com)  
> 


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